


Trial By Faith

by cecilantro



Series: Somebody Else - Altiria AU [1]
Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game), Dungeons & Dragons - All Media Types, Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe, Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition, Dungeons & Dragons References, Fantasy, M/M, Original Character(s), Original Fiction, Original Universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-24
Updated: 2020-10-03
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:06:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 24
Words: 50,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25475845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cecilantro/pseuds/cecilantro
Summary: Lila has seen a lot of flashes in the future. He’s seen her eyes turn to storm-ridden skies, seen the stars blink out in whatever it is to come, and he doesn’t want that. He doesn’t want Jester to have died for nothing. He doesn’t want to not save the world.It shouldn’t be their problem, he thinks. There are a million other people that could save the world.But it isn’t a million other people that Lila has seen tearing themselves to oblivion. It’s him. It’s them. She has seen the world rended apart, and she is so, so determined to stop it.Five strangers come face-to-face and toe-to-toe with the end of the world, fearing a dark dawn that precludes the return of the Ultimate Destroyer.They must work together through unknowing to find a way to halt the Destroyer's path, and though the weight of the world is heavy on their shoulders, the burden is lighter when they are not alone.Update schedule: Every 3 days for the contents of "book 1"! I haven't finished "book 2" yet, but that'll come eventually.
Series: Somebody Else - Altiria AU [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1845454
Kudos: 3





	1. Mist

**Author's Note:**

> SO this is a nice long "au fic" of a dnd game i play in that I wrote for nanowrimo 2019! Buuuut sadly only one of my fellow players has actually read it, "despite" it covering a lot of things that are relevant and important in _my_ dnd campaign that all but one of the other players/dm play in.  
> And the one that doesn't play in that campaign? Is the only one that has read this. It's kinda hilarious actually.
> 
> I don't expect this to get even a fraction of the attention that my fics do, but I'm really, really proud of it, and if even one other person reads it, I might cry with excitement.  
> Hope y'all like fantasy!
> 
> (Magic system tldr, each person's soul _is_ their source of magic. It's possible to run too low to functionally do magic, physically exhausting yourself. Each person generally only has one "element" of magic, but magic is split into 5 major elements (Earth, Air, Water, Fire, and Spirit) and those break down into sub-elements that don't need listed- ut the idea is like, ice, blood, and lightning etc.  
> Healing is 'clanless' magic, which every person can learn regardless of other magical prowess.  
> That's all necessary i think- I really hope you enjoy!)

The night is heavy, muggy and thick with fog and the kind of thin rain that sticks and chokes without making anything truly wet. Through the cobbled streets sweeps a dark figure, quick, their oilskin cloak loose behind them and utterly useless in the rain.  
Light glances off of them as they shift toward the shadows, away from the oil-lit lamps dimmed through swirls of pearlescent fog, blurred by the misty rain that hangs in the air. They sweep into an alleyway and begin a series of jumps between the two vertical walls, catching the roof with their fingertips and pulling up as in a cat jump.

They are above the fog here, treading lightly across rooftops, their tail writhing behind them for balance. Arms splayed to either side, they step up to the edge of one roof and find exactly what they’re looking for a short distance away; another cloaked figure, settled on another rooftop, watching something intently in the street below. The first of the two checks the gaps across the street and, deciding that they could not make it with a regular jump, they pull a revolver barrel from their hip and spin until they find the pale golden crystal they’re looking for. All equipment re-attached safely, they take a few steps back.

And then they jump from the roof.

They loose a burst of blue energy into the crystal between their gloved fingers and, instead of falling, they soar upward near-silently on a burst of wind, landing neatly on the other side. Satisfied, they make their way around toward their target, who seems not to have noticed them.

As they approach, they speak for what feels to be the first time in months,

“Phoenix,” it comes as a rasp from their unused tongue, muffled by their mask, “What a surprise. They told me you would be here.”

Phoenix startles, but only barely. They turn, catch sight of the raven mask and the glassy blue orbs that hide their new acquaintance's eyes, and give a terse smile before they turn back,

“Zephyr,” They offer, “I wasn’t told that you’d be here.”

Zephyr comes and settles beside Phoenix, cold-numbed fingers working at a buckle by their ear until they can slide their mask up over their wild orange hair. They breathe in the damp night air and shiver at the sudden chill in their lungs, their patterned eyes finding the object of Phoenix’s attention and watching, carefully.

“That your quarry?” They ask, and Phoenix gives a single nod. They both observe the elven woman as she laughs; her hair is almost dirty blonde, intricately done up in fine loops, the combs keeping it in place so fine they could be a queen’s. Despite this, however, her dress is torn and she seems to have no noble posture; she’s sat at a table, in a bar, holding a chicken in one arm whilst another pecks around the table in front of her. The two can see that she has companions, but from their vantage point, they cannot see who.

“That’s her.” Phoenix affirms with a nod, leaning back a little, “I’ve been following her here for a day or so, but she’s never alone. She travels with two humans.”  
  


Zephyr gives a derisive snort, shaking their head,  
  


“Humans. Really?” They give a huff of a sigh, “So what’s your mission? Capture, or kill?”

  
Phoenix’s face twists a little, pulling the odd, glowing golden cracks into unusual shapes across their porcelain-white skin,

“I suppose capture. She seems to have run away, her mothers are looking for her. And you? Why are you here?”

“Same as always,” Zephyr gives Phoenix a wry smile and draws onto their knees so they can slip their favoured golden revolver from its holster on their belt, “To kill.”

“Target?”

“Human man, around twenty, maybe twenty-one. Dark hair, grey eyes, dresses like a noble trying to be stealthy with their money. Smokes like a chimney. Name of Carver Blackwood.”

Phoenix arches an eyebrow,

“Huh. One fitting that description travelling with mine, actually.”

“Oh, really? Well, if you’ve found him for me, that’s terribly convenient. I can kill him, you can take her when she’s frightened.”

“I don’t think so,” It’s Phoenix’s turn to smile wryly at Zephyr, “She’s far more dangerous than she looks. She can fight hand-to-hand to outmatch her friends, she’s alright with a staff, and a deadeye shot with a longbow. They have a third, too, though I don’t know much about them.”

Zephyr gives another sigh and sits back down, dangling their legs over the edge of the roof.

“Excellent. Just excellent- well, if our quarries are together, it may be worth working together to achieve our ends.”

“You’re probably right.” Phoenix’s eyes find their quarry again, “So, would you prefer real names, or organisation names?”

“Real,” Zephyr grimaces, “ _Zephyr_ sounded good when I was first recruited. _Northern wind._ Now it just makes me cringe.”

“Me too,” Phoenix rolls their eyes, “I’m Ashen.”

“Aoibheann,” Zephyr- Aoibheann- says, offering a hand out to Ashen, “Or just Vahn. It’s from primordial Orcish, so it has… odd, spellings.”

“Vahn,” Ashen replies, shaking his hand, “Pleasure. Well, it’s unlikely we’ll get too far tonight; I have an inn room if you’d like to rest? You seem tired.”

“I am, but I have another idea first.” Vahn gives Ashen a smile, and slips himself right off the edge of the roof.  
Ashen lurches forward, concerned, until he spots Vahn on the street below with dissipating silver around his hands and feet, crouched and unharmed. He shoots Ashen a barely-visible look before he stands, breathes out, and lets his whole body change.

His hair shifts from orange to a fine gold, straightens and grows longer, almost shoulder length. His tail, too, lengthens, fur tufting at the ends as his horns curl back like a rams, his skin shifting to a sand-yellow tone. When he opens his eyes, they are the same deep ocean blue, with an intricate white pattern, but his physical appearance otherwise is worlds apart. He pulls his mask from his head and slips it into his endless satchel, along with the majority of his gunsmith’s tools. He keeps the single golden revolver in its holster, and looks up toward Ashen,

“Back soon.” Vahn winks, and steps across the fogbound street, into the bar, leaving Ashen to stare horrified and dumbfounded.

He has made some sort of terrible mistake. Zephyr is a revered name in the Ô'ayli's-perla; he is an incredible assassin, rumoured even to shoot silently with his guns, and the contraptions he passes off as such. He’s supposed to be incredibly smart, quiet as a breeze, and swift as the wind.

Well, Ashen is pretty sure he’s an idiot. But okay.

  
  
  
  
  


_Aoibheann Eílish-_

_We have heard whispers of your skills. Both in creation, and in destruction._

_Put simply, your skills are of use to us and ours. Our organisation is interested in employing and training your abilities._

_If you are interested, all you need do is slip this letter through the bars of your cell and set it alight. We will come for you._

_Swift justice,_

_Ô'ayli's-perla_

  
  
  


Vahn’s eyes rake over the rest of the bar first. Ashen’s nameless quarry is in an awkward corner to observe without being obvious, so he sidles to the bar and orders a wine flute of rosé, dropping twice its worth on the bar. He appreciates his bar staff, and tipping them is a favourite hobby of his.

He sits at a bar stool and takes the opportunity to turn, as though he surveying the whole of the bar. His eyes are drawn to the table in the corner, though, where the chicken lady has climbed onto a chair to excitedly tell some sort of story, pointing with her free arm as her companions laugh.

He observes her companions, for a moment- Ashen was correct, they are both human. One has pale hair, slicked back, a greatsword at his side with a back-sheathe cloaking it. He wears a heavy, oilskin raven-black cloak, even in the relative warmth of the tavern, and Vahn can see pale hands on the table wrapped around a mug.  
Her second companion certainly fits the description of Carver Blackwood. Tall, unhealthily thin, skin somewhat sallowed and eyes sunken as though he hasn’t slept in days, hair as dark as the shadows outside. He is smiling, weakly, but smiling as the elven woman tells her story, and a third chicken flutters its way up onto the table to make its way over to Blackwood. He reaches out, tentatively, and pets its back. It revels in the attention.

The pale-haired one stands, says something quickly, and then turns toward the bar. Vahn averts his eyes, quickly, tries to seem as though he was not watching.

Apparently, he does not succeed quite quick enough.

“Hi, I’m Rogal!”

The pale-haired one is stood now at Vahn’s side by the bar, one hand pushing his empty mug across the bar, the other extended toward Vahn, backed up by a smile that seems as genuine as the morning sun. Vahn does not startle, despite his instinct, and instead he plasters on a fake smile and reaches out to shake.

  
“Hello there. I’m-”

There is a pause. Momentary, but a pause, as he tries to find an answer to this unasked question, 

“Corvis,” Vahn says, taking Rogal’s hand and shaking, “Nice to meet you.”

Rogal’s head cocks for a moment, as though he is trying to figure Vahn out. A streak of anxiety runs rampant through him in that split-second of silence, though he keeps his fake smile in place. After less than a moment, Rogal relaxes,

“Nice to meet you too! You know, if you’re lonely, you can come and sit with us. It’s okay.”

“Uh,” Vahn was not expecting that. But it does seem ideal, “I- ah.” He gives a laugh, tries to make it sound awkward, but light, “I would like that, yes. How did you know I was lonely?”

Rogal shrugs as he requests another two mugs of hot chocolate, slides the money over, and turns back to Vahn,

“I saw you looking at us, and I know what it feels like to be lonely. I like to try and be nice to everyone.” He gives the assassin another morning-bright smile, and Vahn feels something like guilt stir in his gut, but shakes it loose. He hasn’t felt anything remotely like remorse for many seasons past. He picks his wine flute up, as Rogal is handed his two steaming mugs,  
  


“Lead the way, sir.”

Rogal gives a quick nod, and begins the path back to the table, picking his way through drunkard’s legs and thrown out chairs, cloaks and bodies and the scent of spilled ale. Vahn follows, carefully.

“We have a new friend,” Rogal declares brightly as he sets the mugs down, slipping one toward the elven woman. She has, now, thankfully, sat down. Rogal pulls a seat out for Vahn between him and Blackwood, lets Vahn sit before he sits himself, “This is Corvis. Corvis, these are my friends, Li-”

“It’s spelled _Lila,_ but the _la_ is silent.” The elven woman- Lila- chips in helpfully with a smile,

“And this is Carver.” Rogal gestures to Blackwood, cementing Vahn’s certainty that this is, in fact, his own quarry. He wishes he had his poisons on him, it would make this job faster. Carver lifts a hand in greeting, turning that weak smile Vahn’s way.

“Lovely to meet you,” Vahn makes his smile crinkle his eyes at the edges. Lila waves at the chickens,

“Rogal, you forgot Peppercorn, Peanut, Aubergine, and Persimmon!”

“Oh!” Rogal looks apologetic, “Sorry, Li. Her chickens,” he explains, when Vahn looks confused, gesturing to the birds. One of them has found its way to pecking around Vahn’s feet. Two on the table, one of which is still graciously soaking in Carver’s feather scritches and… _purring?_  
Lila still holds the fourth in her arms. Vahn has to, begrudgingly, admit that they’re cute.

“So, what brings you to Wyldhase?” Rogal asks brightly, taking a sip of his drink and jerking back from the heat, “It’s out of the way.”

“My job asks me to travel.” Vahn offers, because in his experience, partial truths are far better than total lies. Lila sits properly, finally sets her beloved chicken- Peanut, by her introduction- on the table, and wraps both hands around her drink as she leans forward, intrigued.

“What do you do? It sounds exciting.”

Vahn studies her, momentarily. It’s odd; her open excitement and bright personality seems to make her harder to read, harder to ascertain exactly what she’s about. He doesn’t doubt that she’s genuinely interested, but it discomforts him to know he can’t quite read her right.

“I’m an underling,” this, too, is a partial truth, “I do what I’m told. So I travel to collect things for my… boss. Employer?”

“You collect things,” Carver speaks up, a low, near-monotone voice full of suspicion and roughened by smoke, “That’s vague. What things do you collect?”

“Oh!” Vahn forces the lightest laugh he can, “Sorry! I’d lose my head if it wasn’t screwed on! I collect all sorts of things, but I’m mostly sent out to collect paperwork. Scrolls and books, sometimes letters, you know?”  
This is the closest he’s gotten to a true lie. The paperwork comes before and after, but technically speaking, he does collect a binder of it in his endless satchel.

Carver studies Vahn for a concerningly long period of time. Vahn pretends not to notice, turning instead to share idle chatter about the weather with Rogal and Lila, comments on the chickens being adorable, sips his wine. From the corner of his eye, he sees Carver’s shoulders loosen a little- Vahn has convinced him. He feels a knot of worry loosen in his own chest, and allows himself an exhale.

He spends about half an hour with the group in the bar. Outside, Ashen fiddles more, and more with his fletching arrows, making more mistakes the longer he goes. When he accidentally attaches the cock feather too early and too tightly and it cracks, he sighs and gives up. He packs his fletching supplies away and checks out the three arrows he’s managed to make before his anxiety got the best of him. They’re not the highest of quality, but they’ll function when he needs them. They’re not killing arrows, but that’s fine; he rarely kills now, anyway.

He counts the seconds, waiting. The minutes trickle by. Five. Ten. He spots Vahn’s cloak settle at the table at the edge of his vision, and that soothes him somewhat. He gives up fletching the arrows about twenty minutes in. The chickens move across the table, there doesn’t seem to be any panic, but Ashen keeps an arrow nocked in his longbow just in case. It’s one of the ones equipped with a small, orange mana crystal, designed to burst into smoke on impact. A distraction.

He watches, as Vahn leans across the table to scratch the elven woman’s favoured chicken gently under the chin. It closes its eyes and leans into the touch, and a small, genuine smile crosses the hellborn’s face as he pulls and sits back, mostly out of sight of Ashen once again. 

Twenty five minutes. Thirty.

Ashen’s quarry is laughing brightly at something. Vahn hands something to her across the table, and in the brief moment that Ashen sees his face, there is something new and genuine there.

Thirty-five.  
Fourty.  
At forty-three minutes, Aoibheann stands from the table and makes his excuses,

  
“Ah, I lost track of the time! I’m _so_ sorry, it’s been lovely talking to you. Are you in town long?”

“A couple more days before we move on, yeah,” Lila beams at him, “Then we’re moving on to Bluudon, I think?”

Rogal nods, Carver makes a soft noise of affirmation, and Vahn nods along,

“That does sound familiar… I’ll have to check my books- that might be the next place I’m meant to be! I can let you know, if you want?”

“Oh, that would be nice!” Lila beams, looking between her companions for input. Rogal nods enthusiastically, Carver gives an inattentive hum, so she continues, “We’re here this time tomorrow, too! If you want to come and see us, Corvis?”

_Corvis._ He’d forgotten that was his name, here. He does not let his smile falter, and nods quickly, excitedly,

“Excellent! I’ll let you know either way. Thank you for being so kind and hospitable, Rogal, Lila, Carver.” He nods at each of them in turn, reaches across the table to give Peanut one last chin scratch, and says his goodbyes before making his way out of the tavern.

  
  


“ _What was that?_ ” Ashen hisses, slipping down the edge of the building to join Vahn in the street as he shakes the gold back out to his usual orange hair and human-ish skin, “That was _so stupid!_ If you weren’t Ô'ayli's-perla...”

“Ah, but I am.” Vahn gives Ashen a bright smile, eyes light, “And I gathered a lot of information, too. Come on, let’s get somewhere warm, and I’ll tell you everything.”

  
  


Vahn turns over all the information he’s gathered. Lila Greenleaf, lost princess of the Alabaster Boscage. She’s not quite sure where she is, and she wants to get home, but she also happens to be a Seer. She’s Seen hints of a new darkness, and has joined forces with Rogal and Carver in an attempt to stop it from escaping.

Rogal gave away nothing and everything. He’s given absolutely no details on who he is, or what he does, but he’s a genuine person, caring, and absolutely does not use the greatsword he carries in his back-sheathe. He has no other visual weapons, but Vahn knows the muscle build and the calluses of people that wield greatswords, and Rogals does not match in any way.

Carver is a cryptic one. He’s suspicious, and anxious, and gave nothing away beside that. He seems to genuinely care for his companions, though, so that may be a point to press if they need anything.

Ashen notes down all of this information in his tiny, leatherbound black book of information. It’s nearing half full, now, and his ink is running out, scratching uncomfortably across the paper. He has sketches of the combs in Lila’s hair, and notes down Vahn’s codename with a _V_ beside it. Spy etiquette- don’t reveal identities, even in what you think is private.

As they speak, Aoibheann sets up his bedroll and blankets at one side of Ashen’s room. His blankets are somewhat dirty, he’s been sleeping in rough places for a few weeks, and could really do with getting them a wash. Well, if they’re in town for a couple of days, he can probably make that happen. Or, at the very least, he can buy himself a new set.

He and Ashen discuss the quarry for a short while, pondering the best way to split the group for fulfillment of contract, the best way to get Rogal out of the picture, and what on earth his _deal_ could be. Eventually, the oil in the lamp on the table begins to run low, and Vahn eyes it for a few moments before sighing,

“We should rest. We can find out more tomorrow.”

“I suppose.” Ashen reaches over to snap down the lid of the lantern, cutting off the oxygen from the flame and plunging the room into shadow, “Best of luck. Night, Zephyr.”

Vahn hears him tucking himself up into the scratchy, cheap inn room bed sheets, and he smiles into the darkness. It has been a long time since somebody said anything like _goodnight_.

  
“Night, Phoenix.”

He settles into his own blankets and breathes the scent of leaf-litter and old wood, rotting away into the earth. The smell of the forest, and it lulls him to sleep in ignorance of all of the atrocities he’s committed and the bodies he’s laid to waste across the continent.


	2. Introspective Observation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We pan over to Lila and her companions for a brief interlude...

Lila, from behind the screen, speaks up,

“He didn’t seem weird to me! He seemed to like Peanut!”

Her companions sigh at her naivité, but they are almost affectionate. She sees the best in people. This Corvis is no different.

“There’s something weird about him,” Rogal muses, “I can’t figure out what it is, but something’s not right.”

“He wasn’t telling us everything about his job,” Carver agrees, “In fact, he was very deliberately choosing his words to avoid telling us as much information as possible. But, then again, so are we.”

“That makes sense, though, really,” Rogal points out, gestures to the screen that hides Lila as she changes to her sleep clothes, “None of us want to be upfront about things that can hurt us. Li being a princess is already a lot, he doesn’t need to know about your family, or my magic.”

“I don’t know why you guys are being so secretive!” Lila chides, pushing the screen aside now that she’s dressed in the loose shirt and leggings she sleeps in. Her chickens cluck peacefully around her bare feet, she pads toward the bed Rogal and Carver are sat on, “If he wanted to hurt us, wouldn’t he have done it?”

“Not if he’s looking for information.” Carver shakes his head, “I’ll ask some friends of mine, see if I can gather anything. Be careful what you tell him, Li.”

“ _Alright,_ ” Lila rolls her eyes, “We’ll see tomorrow what’s happening. Okay?”

“Alright.” Rogal and Carver answer split seconds apart, and Lila puts an arm around either of them. Carver tries and fails not to freeze up. Lila pretends not to notice.

“Thank you, for coming with me, by the way. I’m not sure what’s going wrong, but I get the feeling only we can stop it.”

“Just like real heroes!” Rogal replies, enthusiastically, “I’m here to help.”

“You’re already a real hero,” Carver gives him a genuine smile, “You’ve saved so many people. Even if you can’t tell them it’s you. You’re already a hero.”

“Aww, thank you, Carver. That’s nice of you to say- but I want to be a hero that doesn’t have to hide! I promised my mother that I would be a hero. I don’t intend to let her down.”

“You won’t.” Li pats his shoulder, and then shoves him and Carver hard, sending the latter of the two sprawling off the bed. There’s a moment of panicked worry, and then Carver laughs from the floor, and Lila relaxes again, “Sorry! But we should go to bed, I’m really tired! And we have to be up early for the Archives tomorrow…”

“You’re right,” Rogal shifts off to go take his own bed, “I’ll see you in the morning. Goodnight!”

“Night, Rogal!” Lila chirrups, tucking herself into the covers of the bed. Carver sighs as he reaches out with a shadow-shimmer of black magic and snaps the extinguish cover over the oil wick, then settles himself onto his own bed and lays, flat on his back, staring at the ceiling. 

It’s going to be a long night.

It always is.


	3. Encounters and Re-Encounters

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Morning arrives for the Ô'ayli's-perla, and with it comes blood.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "extra" chapter update because c2 is so short!
> 
> Also the introduction of namedrop cameos for critical role starts here- brownie points if you catch the ones that aren't names later on >3c  
> (also no named Jester in this chapter is not Jester Lavorre, its just same first name)

Morning comes as it always does- unpleasantly, quickly, and too-quick. Aoibheann, laid underneath the window, is the first to wake under the sunlight. He comes to with a groan, and turns over to bury his face in his blankets, knowing he won’t be able to get back to sleep but trying valiantly anyway.

The sunlight is weak in the mid-autumn, phased through a faint morning mist that does nothing to disperse it, or make it less annoying to Vahn.

After about ten minutes of trying and failing to get back to sleep, he sighs and sits up, rooting through his endless satchel and willing his mask to his hand, first, then his sketchbook.

He writes in ciphered elvish. This is his easiest one, he thinks- it wouldn’t take long to break, if you could read elvish. When he’s dealing with more precious information, he writes in something completely separate, an ancient and unspeakable language run through a cipher of his own design. Of course, only he can read it. He’s pretty sure.

The chill of the morning begins to seep into him as he draws a brief sketch of Ashen and scripts up a _P_ next to his name in Elvish. He trusts only himself with Ashen’s real name.

Ashen wakes an hour or so past sunrise, sitting up and blinking, yawning.

“Morning,” Says Aoibheann.

“ _Fuck,_ ” Says Ashen, emphatically, and has drawn and shot from his longbow before he even thinks. Vahn curses and ducks to one side just quick enough to avoid being shot in the eye. Instead, the arrow _thunks_ into his shoulder and he bites his tongue so hard he tastes blood in an effort not to scream. Now bleeding from two places, he widens his eyes in Ashen’s direction. He’s nocking another arrow, still bleary, and Vahn’s brain just… panics. With his uninjured arm, he lifts, and sweeps through the air. A telekinetic force, a wave of blue, sweeps across Ashen’s arms and knocks the bow right out of his hands,

“ _Hey,_ ” Vahn says, dripping blood from his bitten tongue, “Chill. It’s just me.”

  
“Shit, sorry,” Ashen scrambles from his bed to make his way over to Vahn, looking extremely guilty,

  
“Don’t sweat it.” Vahn gives him a brief, bloody smile before he covers his mouth with his hand and exhales, releasing a brief spray of blood a split-second before waves of cobalt blue ripple across his face and the pain from his bitten tongue begins to ease. He swallows the last mouthful of blood, and moves instead to wrap a hand around the shaft of the arrow,

  
“ _Wait,_ don’t pull it out! The head’s flared to either fuck you up or stay in. Hold on.” Ashen waves in warning, shuffling through his belongings as quickly as he can until he finds the surgical scalpel and rubbing alcohol he uses for extraction of arrows and bullets. He makes his way to Vahn’s side and apologises a few times as he tears through the fabric around the wound. It’s blood-soaked and unsalvageable anyway, to be perfectly fair.

“How’s it look?” Vahn asks, eyes fixed on the door on the other side of the room. Ashen sucks his teeth for a few moments as he studies it, and lets out a sigh,

“Definitely could have been worse. Sit still,” he instructs, and begins the extraction process. Sanitising the blade, wiping it down, slicing into the skin in just the right places to free the head without too much scarring. It’s not too deep, which is… good. Seems to have hit bone, though, which probably hurt- “Grit your teeth,” he warns as he takes hold of the shaft, and Vahn does as he’s told before Ashen eases the arrow from his flesh. Vahn makes no noise. Not even a peep. Though he shakes violently the second Ashen’s arrow is free, and claps a hand quickly over the wound to begin magically healing it.

“Thanks,” Vahn says, and Ashen gives him something between a smile and a grimace,

“Sorry.”

“It’s fine, I get that it’s weird to wake up and not be alone when you’ve been along for so long.” Vahn gives Ashen a weak smile, still stained with blood, “I don’t take it personally. Plus, no harm done. Your arrows are really well made.”

“Thanks,” Ashen stands up and inspects the arrow in the morning light, checking it over. With a clean, it could very easily be used again, the structural integrity is sound, and the wood doesn’t flex unusually when he tests it.

  
  
  


“That hurt,” Vahn offers, and Ashen gives a little bark of laughter,

“It’s meant to. I hear you shoot with guns, though?”

“Yeah,” Vahn shoves a hand into his endless satchel and wills his pistol to him, pulling it from the magical leather, and displays it to Ashen. It’s a fine weapon, gilded in gold with spiraling designs in what appears to be enamel black. There’s a slot, carefully placed where a barrel would be in a true revolver, which catches Ashen’s attention,

“What is that?”

“Oh, that’s- hold on,” Vahn goes now to his belt, and pulls his revolver barrel from it. He spins it for the least destructive crystal and picks out a faint silver, holds it up, “This… should be a water crystal.”

“Nott the Brave,” Ashen agrees, “I recognise the colour.”

“Good, I got the right one. Watch,” And he slips the crystal into the slot. Immediately, what Ashen had previously thought to be enamel lights up in spirals of silver, glowing the same colour as the crystal. Vahn aims at the wall, a good distance from anything that can be destroyed, and pulls the trigger.

There’s a faint, whining _boom_ , the same sort of noise as dropping a ball of red-hot iron into cold water, and a bright silver flash. The gun’s swirls are black once again, and there is now a ball of water that has smashed into the wall where he was aiming, cracking the plasterboard there and bursting like a balloon a moment later. It soaks everything around it, and Vahn winces,

“I’ll pay for that.”

“You’ll have to,” Ashen stares, wide-eyed, at the water-made dent in the wall, “I don’t have the money. That was- _wow-_ that was a lot. _Cool._ ”

“Thanks,” Vahn smiles as he taps the gun to his hand and releases the now-empty crystal from the slot, tucks it back into the revolver barrel, “It’s my pet project. Not my favourite gun, but definitely the most useful with magic.

“I can see why,” Ashen nods approvingly, wandering back to his bed to begin packing his things up, “Seems like it could do a lot of damage, with the right magic.”

“I mostly use it for fireballs,” Vahn admits with a hint of a laugh, “It’s the magic I have to hand, so…”

“That’s fair. I mostly use lightning, but I’m generalised Air. Lightning is just… a specialty.”

Vahn perks up, eyes widening, ears twisting and flicking in his excitement,

“Air? Can you fuck with the weather?”

“Uh,” Ashen scratches the back of his neck, “With help? Yeah. A little. Kind of. I’m not great at it, I don’t get to practice a lot, since… you know.”  
He gestures to himself as a whole, and Vahn nods understandingly,

“Yeah, I get that. Most of my company comes from my companion, when I have her. She fell in a lake a couple days ago, though, so I should re-make her sometime.” 

They fall into idle conversation, wounds and blood completely forgotten as they pack their things up and get dressed. They make plans for the day- mostly buying new clothes, gathering rations, having Vahn pay for the damage to the room and for their next room at a different inn. He’s smarter than given credit for, Ashen thinks- Don’t stay in one place too long, especially not when you make a scene by smashing a hole in a wall with a ball of water. Vahn heads out first to pay, already having shifted his appearance to the _Corvis_ of the day before, with golden hair and sandy skin.   
Ashen meets him in the alleyway beside the inn, hood of his leather coat already up and fastened. It doesn’t really hide the shape of his horns, but it’s close enough.

Vahn lets his appearance drop back to normal as he makes his way into the shadow,  
  


“You alright?”

  
“Fine,” Ashen nods with a brief smile, “Just don’t wanna be seen. You know how it is.”

  
“I know.” Vahn agrees with a sigh and a returned smile, “Do you want me to be Corvis? That is, the Hellborn I went into the bar as. My mask is in my bag, so…”

  
“Might help, yeah,” Ashen grimaces, “Go for it.”

  
So he slips back into that golden appearance, breathing through the transformation and pulling his heavy cloak a little tighter around his shoulders, over the mostly-healed arrow wound, hiding the bloodied shirt below from view. He leads the way out of the alley, checking over his shoulder to ensure Ashen is following every now and then,

“We should list up what we need,” Vahn tells Ashen as they turn into the main street. Ashen shrinks away from the crowd, so Vahn puts himself between his new companion and the bulk of the people around them.

“I need rations and feathers,” Ashen’s voice is quiet under the bustle of the street, “And a new bedroll. You need a new shirt.”

“And I need my blankets cleaned.” Vahn grimaces, “And I could do with some milk, too. Cocoa if they have it. Coffee.”

Ashen looks up at him, puzzled, head cocked in his confusion,

“That’s… a weirdly specific shopping list?”

“I have… a friend,” Vahn flashes a grin to Ashen, “I like to keep them appeased.”

_‘Appeased,’_ Jester’s voice rings through Vahn’s head, disgruntled, _‘I don’t ask you for anything.’_

Vahn can’t answer without Ashen hearing too, so he decides instead to roll his eyes. There’s a derisive snort through Vahn’s mind, then Jester falls back to silence. Just as usual.

_Jester_ is Vahn’s best friend, companion, and some sort of semi-divine undead entity. He’s been bound to Vahn for as long as the assassin can remember, right back to when he shot his first gun, when he took his first life. All he remembers is the smell of gunpowder and rended metal, the explosion, the cut-off scream, and the burst of _red, red light_ through his vision.

A boy, barely older than Vahn, in a cloak the colour of blood.

_‘Hey, you need to get up!’_ Jester had whispered in a rush of panic, _‘They’re coming for you!’_

Vahn doesn’t remember what he said. He remembers that everything hurt. He remembers the smell of singed flesh, the shrapnel-pain in his hands and chest, the smoke from where the gun had shattered in his hands.

_‘No, no, you’re not dead yet. You’re just sort of dead. Come on, you need to run now.’_

And Vahn had stood up. He knows that he should not have been able to, he remembers the blood and the stinging and the three missing fingers on his right hand. He remembers blackened flesh and the body of Siarl, shot through the eye and dead on the leaf-strewn floor of the forest. He remembers the boy in the blood-red cloak coming up beside him and supporting him, feeling like a solidity of chilled wind at his side.

_‘Keep moving,’_ Jester had told him, _‘I can help you. I’m here to help you.’_

And what did he want in return? Vahn doesn’t remember asking, but Jester had answered anyway,

_‘A favour. Years from now, just one favour. It won’t be impossible.’_

Vahn, knowing that he was alive only by the grace of this spectral boy dressed in blood red, had agreed.

Ashen waves in front of his face.

“Hey, are you still in there? V- uh. Zephyr?”

Vahn shakes himself out of the memory and mentally curses Jester. He likes to remind Vahn, every now and then, why they’re bound together.

“Yeah, sorry. Spaced out for a bit- what’s up?”

“This shop sells clothes,” Ashen gestures at a storefront beside them, “And that one over there sells chilled milk and exotic supplies. You can probably get your cocoa and coffee there,” he points at a _very_ fancy store across the street from them, one with a green sign and gold detailing in swirling, leafy patterns.

“Are you okay splitting up? I’ll head over there, leave you to the clothes?”

Ashen visibly relaxes, “I’d prefer that actually, yeah. Stores like that can be kinda weird with Hellborn…” and trails off, studying Vahn, “So watch out?”

Vahn gives him a little grin and tucks his tail up under his cloak. Less odd, this way,

“I’ll keep my wits about me,” he promises, “Meet you back here in ten.”

Ashen nods firmly and splits off into the clothes store as Vahn breaks for the exotics shop, splitting from one another.

Ashen is always anxious. It comes with the territory and really is the smart thing to be, he thinks; for Vahn to be so easygoing is cocky and worrisome, he’s overconfident and that leads to danger. But that’s what Ashen has to deal with right now. So he does deal with it, nice and simple.

He picks out a handful of clothes for himself and Vahn. They appear to be the same size, though Ashen’s shoulders and arms seem to be more well-built than Vahn’s on account of their differences in weapons, they should wear similar clothing. The new outfits are mostly black, as is the nature of spy work, but he does surreptitiously pocket a couple of finer silk shirts when he knows there are no eyes on him. They’ll be useful in cases of infiltration. He could get more, if he had an endless satchel like Vahn does.

Eventually, he makes his way to the counter of the store with an armful of cotton shirts and leggings, his cloak hood pulled down and his porcelain-white skin fully visible, golden cracks and all. He’s a picture of contrast, from dark hair to pale skin, and the gold of his magic that stains everything that he does. As he waits for the seamstress to collect him, he runs a hand through his hair and notes that he has two new feathers beginning to grow in uncomfortable places- one right at the base of his neck, the other behind his ear. Hopefully, they’ll be fully grown before too long and he can remove and fletch them into something _useful._

It takes a few minutes for the seamstress to look over from her current client and spot Ashen standing at the counter.

“Just a moment, dear! Sorry to keep you waiting!” She calls over to him, and he glances over to give her a reassuring, apologetic smile. She’s already back to pinning at the seams of a shiny new outfit, her client stands with spread arms watching her, talking amicably about something or other as a chicken stands diligently by his feet. It seems very well-trained, Ashen observes, looking over the client. They seem somewhat younger than Ashen, but not by far. Human, pale-skinned, pale-haired-

_Hold on,_

Ashen’s brain creaks as it fights to recall that cloak. He meets Rogal Ives’ eyes just a moment before it strikes him- _this is the fighter that has been with his quarry._

“Oh! Hallo, my name is Rogal.” Rogal beams, bright, shifting but not moving as the seamstress pins at the edge of his shirt, “Who are you?”

“Um,” says Ashen, eloquently, “I- uh- hi?”

“Mister Ives, please,” The seamstress says without a trace of irritation, “I’m almost done here.”

“Sorry,” Rogal says quickly, flashes Ashen another quick, apologetic smile, and stills himself again.

It’s a minute or so before the seamstress steps back, satisfied with her pins, and instructs Rogal to change as carefully as he can back into his regular clothes, waving him to a screen at the side of the store. He disappears into the confines of the hidden area, and there’s a faint grunt as he begins to change. The seamstress comes to the desk, inspects the clothes Ashen has picked out,

“Sorry about the delay, dear. Is this all? Do you need any adjustments?”

She eyes him, carefully, as though studying his measurements. Ashen shifts uncomfortably.

“No, thank you. This is fine.”

“Aright, this’ll run you…” She stops, clucking as she counts up the numbers, “Four gold, six silver.”

Ashen hisses as he looks at the last of his money, pooled in his gloved hand. Three gold, four silver, two copper. He’s short. The seamstress follows his eye and pulls an apologetic face as he looks up to her,

“Sorry,” he says, quietly, “I- what do I have to drop?”

“I can pay!” Rogal’s voice comes from behind the screen, accompanied by the sound of hopping and grunting, “Just a moment!”

“No, no it’s- you’re fine, it’s okay!” Ashen says- panics, really- “You don’t have to do that!”

“It’s fine!” Rogal replies chirpily, and emerges from behind the screen in his regular clothes, sans the leather armor that Ashen has seen him in so often. He’s _still_ beaming as he comes skittering across the shop to join Ashen at the front counter, “How much do you need? Actually, nevermind, here-” As Ashen opens his mouth to protest, Rogal pulls two shining platinum from a leather pouch at his waist, “That should cover both of us, _ja?_ ”

“More than.” The seamstress beams, “Just a moment and I’ll get your change!”

“Keep it! It’s a tip!” Rogal rocks on his feet, sharing a brief grin with Ashen’s look of pure horror, “When should I drop by to pick mine up?”

“Check in tomorrow morning, I should have it done by then.” The seamstress- a somewhat chubby half-elven woman with red hair and a permanent expression of kind humour- informs Rogal with a smile that crinkles her eyes at the corners. Ashen swallows down his doubts and gives Rogal a small, guilty smile,

“Thank you. Uh- how do you want me to pay you back?”

Rogal waves a hand airily, “Don’t worry about it! It’s not _that_ much. But how about a handshake and a name?” He raises his eyebrows and offers a hand out to Ashen, smile still in place,

“I- uh. Ashen,” Ashen shakes, worrying immediately about giving his real name and panicking internally. _Fuck._

“Ashen! Nice to meet you, Ashen! I guess I’ll see you around?” And with a grin, and without waiting for an answer, Rogal waves at him and dashes for the door. Ashen, shell-shocked, gathers up his pile of new clothes and thanks the seamstress for her help and patience. He follows Rogal’s footsteps, far slower and calmer, and heads out of the door to wait for Vahn.


	4. Public Secrets

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vahn attempts to buy mocha supplies...

Across the street, Vahn steps into the exotics store with his posture straight and a smile in place. A bell above the door tinkles to denote his entrance, and everyone in the little square store looks to him. The person behind the counter, a lanky squirrel homuna with a handlebar mustache, eyes him as he steps into the store, but says nothing. Even if he had, Vahn likely would not have replied, his eyes fixed on the human standing beside the little pots of spices, one eyebrow arched in his direction over tired grey eyes. Just his luck. 

“Carver!” He exclaims, trying to pretend he’s not disappointed and panicking, “What a surprise!”

“Hello, Corvis.” Carver answers, relaxing the raised eyebrow and offering the hellborn a small smile. Vahn steps over to stand beside him, and the third stranger of the store- a half-elf of clear dark elf heritage- shifts their attention away from them both at last.

“What brings you to this store, hm?” Vahn asks Carver, watching him from the corner of his eye as the human returns to studying the pots. Carver gives an amused breath of almost-laughter,

“Li’s looking for a specific kind of plant seed. Nowhere sells the seed, and she can’t grow it herself without knowing what to grow, so I’ve been sent to find it.” he waves a little pot of something toward Vahn before setting it down again. Vahn picks up a separate pot and reads the detailing,

“Leg work, hm? Is this normal for you?”

Carver flashes him a sharp look, grey eyes piercing. His shoulders draw, and Vahn realises he’s pushed a step too far, but pretends not to notice.

“Why do you ask?” Carver’s voice is cold and hard-edged, and Vahn makes a bit of a show of turning and blinking, head cocked,

“Oh, did I upset you? I’m sorry, I’m not great with casual conversation.” And gives Carver what he hopes to be an apologetic, reassuring smile. Carver’s eyes narrow, and Vahn feels a flash of panic knowing that he did not manage to deceive him this time. It’s only a partial lie, he really isn’t good at casual conversation, but he knew what he was doing. He sighs a little, lets some truth slip, “Sorry. I’m just… over-curious, I suppose. I’m bad at people, and I  _ need _ to know as much as I can.”

Carver studies, and Vahn lets as much of his facade drop as he can afford to. He is being honest, he is being open in this. He wants Carver to know that. Needs Carver to believe him.

“I don’t like sharing personal information.” Carver says, after a few moments of silence, “Just like you don’t like telling the truth.”

Vahn flinches a little, tries not to dart away or shoot Carver here and now.

“It’s fine. That you don’t want to tell the truth. But don’t expect me to, either.”

Carver’s eyes shift to meet Vahn’s, and for the first time, the assassin sees past the physical. There’s a moment of magic, a wave of blackness, and for a moment Vahn feels himself teetering at the edge of a boundless, bottomless cavern. He tries to catch his breath as his eyes cast downward to the nothingness below, but he’s so exhausted that it chills his bones. There’s a sense of fear, regret, somehow overwhelming and distant at once. 

_ Must keep moving, _ something whispers like a mantra in little black words of wispy mist,  _ can’t stop. Can’t ever stop. _

_ ‘That’s enough.’ _ Jester’s voice cuts, and Vahn feels that wave of darkness retreat, pushed away by the bright blood-red of Jester’s magic over his field of vision. Carver takes a step back in the physical world, and Vahn’s eyes focus once again on grey eyes and dark circles. Something dull thuds in his mind, like a mental axe to the spine, and he knows Jester will have need of him later. He always needs to repair the bond when Jester severs it.

“That wasn’t appreciated.” Vahn keeps his voice low as he and Carver step back in together to inspect the spices, trying to keep the rage from his tone. His bitten tongue twinges with pain as he clamps onto it again to stop himself speaking further.

“It was an accident.” Carver murmurs in reply, eyes on the little jars, “I don’t have the best control.”

“I can tell. Do you know how close I was to being in your head?”

“Yes. I saw it. And I saw something push me back.” Carver takes a breath and it shakes, “Not you. I know it wasn’t you. It felt like…” and he trails off, eyes fixed on the jars but staring right through, into space. Vahn lets him stew, for a few moments, then sighs.

“Jester,” he murmurs into space, letting his magic seep out to hold together the bond between himself and the spirit, “This is the favour?”

_ ‘Yes.’ _

“Jester?” Says Carver, quietly, and Vahn side-eyes him.

“This is where it starts?”

_ ‘Yes.’ _

“And you didn’t think to warn me?”

_ ‘No.’ _ This has almost a tinge of humour to it,  _ ‘I wanted you to make the decision for yourself to find your heart. Aoibheann, meet my brother.’ _

Vahn looks up from the spices to meet Carver’s eyes and sighs.

“I suppose this is where we have to start being honest, then, isn’t it?”


	5. Unwilling In Bloom

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vahn and Jester have some explaining to do.

Ashen stares at Vahn as he steps out of the store with Carver at his shoulder, wide-eyed and afraid, unsure if he should pretend not to know him or-

“Hey,” Vahn waves a hand at Ashen, “We’ve gotta talk.”  
  


“Uh,” Ashen joins them, eyes shifting between Carver and Vahn, trying to question with his eyes. Vahn shakes his head, minutely, almost imperceivable, and Ashen blinks in reply. Vahn makes a gesture, and Carver nods, shifting in front of them to lead the way.  
  


“I’ll explain soon,” Vahn quietly answers Ashen’s silent question, “But we’re safe.”  
  


“Okay,” Ashen breathes, trying not to panic, “I have no choice other than to trust you.”

  
  


Carver leads them into the finer of the inns in Wyldhase, through winding staircases to a gilded gold door, where he shoves a key into a lock and pushes it open.

“Li,” He says to the apparently-empty room, “I’m back. And we have… guests.”

  
“Guests?” One of the tiles on the roof shifts, and Lila sticks her head from it, her hair falling loose as she hangs upside-down. She blinks in Vahn’s direction as he and Ashen step in, closing the door behind them, “Corvis!”  
  


“Aoibheann,” Vahn re-introduces himself, breathing out and letting his body shift back to its usual appearance. Orange hair. Almost human skin. Blue eyes, white pattern. Lila’s eyebrows raise in surprise, and she loses her grip on the roof, slipping out of the hole with a yelp. Immediately, Ashen and Vahn both throw arms out, and there’s a burst of mingling yellow and cobalt in a cloud around Lila, one tugging at her clothes to slow her fall, the other puffing into a cloud of writhing wind to catch her and lower her, slowly, to the ground. Both Mages drop their arms with little more than an extra couple of heavy breaths, the light dissipating as Lila blinks up at them.  
  


“Thank you!” She chirrups, head cocked, “Why are you here?”  
  


“That’s a story.” Carver grimaces, and takes his place sat at the foot of his bed. Vahn settles himself on the floor, and Ashen, unsure what to do, sits beside him. Vahn takes a steadying breath and looks over his shoulder to meet Ashen’s concerned eyes,

“You can say as much or as little as you like. I’m going to be honest about me.”

It’s a warning, Ashen realises. If he wants out, now is the time. He looks from Vahn to Lila, then to Carver, who has his face in his hands and is trembling minutely. There’s a flash of red over Vahn’s eyes when he meets them again, and for a moment he’s looking into somebody else’s, blood-red eyes. Their stare is level on his, calm and measured. It sends a shiver through Ashen’s spine, one that shocks to his bones. Another wave of dim red glow, and he once again sees blank blue with curling white.

“I’ll stay,” Ashen says, not because he wants to. There is a compulsion within him. Vahn gives him a studying look for a few moments, then nods once, firmly, turning back to the others.

  
“Alright,” he says, “let me fill you in.”

  
  


Vahn tells Carver, Lila, and Ashen about that night in the forest. He tells them about Siarl’s body, the blood on his hands, the smell of gunpowder. He tells them of the first time he met Jester, and the deal that he made. He tells them of the favour, the one that for so many years has been up in the air, he’s never been sure- _until he just knew._

“It didn’t register the first time I met you,” Vahn nods in Carver’s direction, “He didn’t say anything.”

_‘I was distracted.’_

“He was distracted,” Vahn repeats, out loud, a hint of a smile creeping into his voice. There’s grumbling from Jester in the back of his mind. Carver’s eyes are wide and blank, staring through the floor, looking for all intents and purposes as though he has seen a ghost.  
“But that second time, in the store, after he was forced to step in and cut you back- for a moment, that edge we were walking. Me, and you, and him- it was so thin that I just- I knew. I can’t explain it.”

There’s a shiver that settles around Vahn’s shoulders like a cloak, the signature sensation of Jester coming to rest in the same place as him.

“ _Carver_ ,” his voice is some kind of amalgamation, “ _Look,_ ”

Carver’s eyes have shot up before he can finish the sentence. Vahn knows that when he meets grey, it is not blue staring back at him. It is blood-red. He blinks. Jester does too. 

“ _The glove,_ ” Jester asks with Vahn’s voice, “ _is that-?_ Yes, yeah. Go on.”

Gloved fingers work at stiff leather ties and buttons, and between their numb hands, Vahn and Jester work the glove off of his right hand. They flex their right fingers, to an intake of breath from the rest of the room.

Vahn’s flesh is massively scarred, a mess of gnarled, pearlescent skin and wounds that never truly healed. Where three of his fingers should sprout, it is worse, after they’d been blown off. In their places, however, there is the dim red glow of Jester’s magic. Solid, and permanent, forming the flesh that was destroyed the night he saved Vahn. Together, they clench the hand into a fist, and release again, pulling the glove back on. Vahn is trembling finely, hosting Jester for so long is exhausting, and his friend knows this.  
  


“ _I’m just putting the glove back on,_ ” Jester assures in Vahn’s voice, “ _I don’t think you’ll be able to when I back off._ No, you’re right. Thanks, Jester.” and answers in his own, in the same breath.  
  


They fasten the glove back in place, and Jester’s presence is gone from Vahn’s skin. Immediately, the hellborn buckles and collapses to the floor, completely unconscious, and Lila yelps as she jumps from the bed to his side. She puts a hand to his shoulder in a burst of green magic, letting it seep through him as she searches for just what it is that made him pass out. Carver, on his bed, shakes his head,

“He’s alright, Li. He’s just- exhausted. He needs to rest for a bit.”  
  


“Huh?” Lila looks over her shoulder at Carver, “How do you know?”  
  


“Just… trust me. I know Jester.”

Lila thinks for a moment, then nods, pulling her hand back and letting the green dissipate. Instead, she snags Vahn up by his coat and heaves him up onto her bed, on his side, where he remains perfectly unaware of everything. She makes sure he’s still breathing, then turns back and smiles at Ashen, who has somehow paled further and looks very much as though he’s about ready to turn to pure marble. He stares at Vahn’s unconscious form like seeing a ghost- well. Technically, _technically,_ he did. In the few minutes that follow Vahn’s collapse, Carver fills in some blanks- Jester _was_ his brother.   
Emphasis on _was,_ he’s been presumed dead for years. After making his way into the Solar Realm to restore the Sun-Heart to its podium, he was torn to shreds by the light. Nothing can resist it, after all. Even cloaked in twilight, even with shadows pulled to him, he only managed to survive long enough to set the Sun-Heart in its place and ensure the seal of Caertium’s cage could never be broken as long as it rests there.

He hadn’t come back, and it’s common knowledge in the old Lynchpin circles that nothing can survive the Far Realms.  
  


“He was fourteen,” Carver says, voice rough, as he drags a match across the striker to light a cigarette, “We were both young.”  
  


“Both?” Lila asks, in Ashen’s tongue-tied silence  
  


“Olivia, my sister. She’s older than me, not by much- but we were young. When he died. When he-” he stops as his voice shakes, takes a drag to steady himself, “- When he saved everyone. He did all that by himself.”  
  


“I’ve heard about that,” Ashen frowns, shifting on his numb legs before deciding to stand, “Distantly. I always thought it was just… a story. I didn’t know that other Realms were-”  
  


“Real?” Lila perks up, elven ears twitching with excitement and mischief glittering in her eyes, “They’re _very_ real. Some of them just look like this world, but _different._ ”  
  


“Glimmer, or Gloam?” Carver looks up from his hands to ask, and Lila flashes a grin over her shoulder,  
  


“Glimmer! My moms guard the gateway to the Glimmer Realm, and I’m _technically_ the princess there. The Alabaster Boscage is just… the hallway!”  
  


Carver snorts, shaking his head in vague disbelief, “The hallway.”  
  


“The hallway?” Ashen echoes, and Lila’s ears flicker up as she turns her attention back to him,  
  


“Mm-hm! There’s ten Realm Gates total! My moms guard the Glimmer Gate, but there’s a bunch more out there. I guess Jester must have found Ophelia and her gate, if it was the Solar Realm he went to?”

There’s a pause, a moment of recognition in Carver’s eyes, he looks up and nods at her, “I remember that name. Ophelia… Ophelia Loz’nt?”

“Yes!” Lila beams, “Exactly! She’s such a lovely person…”

“She let Jester die.” Carver cuts her off, flat and monotone, and Lila’s smile fades into a faint frown. Ashen, leaned up against a wall, lets out a heavy sigh.

“You’re with Rogal, right?” He cuts the conversation off best he can, “The one with the silver hair.”

“That’s right! You’ve met Rogal?” Lila looks to him, the smile back in place, and Ashen gives a tense smile,

“Yeah, he’s- uh. A bit like a hurricane. But where is he? He left before me.”

Lila waves a hand, “Probably making friends! He likes to talk to new people!”

“I figured,” Ashen’s smile eases, becomes a little more genuine, “He bought mine and Vahn’s new clothes because I was short.”

“Sounds like Rogal.” Carver agrees, and Lila nods, “I’m not looking forward to explaining all of this to him when he gets back. Who knows where he is right now?”


	6. The Bloodied Hero

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We find out what Rogal is doing.

Rogal crouches on the roof of the building, pressed as low as he dares. His hood is up and belted into place so that it does not flap away from his face. He doesn’t know how long his party will be in this town, and he doesn’t want to be run out without them. He likes his new friends.

He’s been following this one person for a good half an hour. It’s broad daylight, not his usual operating time, but something has rubbed him the wrong way about whoever this is. As they shift through another alley, Rogal follows, air-light. He’s somewhat clumsy with his magic after some time of not practicing, but it’s a matter of balance and willpower, both of which he has. He holds his boots upright in place, mid-air, and walks by shifting his concentration from one boot to the next as he creeps through the air behind his prey.

The red light would attract attention in the night, so it’s a tactic he rarely gets to use. But in the one benefit of daylight, it doesn’t shine like a beacon. Nobody notices as he tracks through the air, watching the shadow of their hood turn each way before they slip down another side-alley. Rogal, of course, follows.  
  
Dread begins to pool in his stomach, the signature feeling that something is about to be very wrong, and he draws breath and reaches for his weapon.

_His weapon._

His scythe is not in its usual place strapped, stripped-down on his hip. He had left it in the room this morning. It’s easy to do that when your weapon does not _demand_ to be taken everywhere.   
  
He has no choice. He slips Dolor from its back-sheathe and draws it to hold out ahead of him. The greatsword seems to suck in the light from around it, and the red around Rogal’s boots turns shadow-black. Power surges through Rogal, so hard that he almost loses concentration on his boots. He manages to hold himself in place with little more than a gasp-

His prey turns quickly, looks up at him with their hand on the latch of a cellar door and their eyes widen, angry and afraid at once.

  
“Shit,” They curse, “Hey! Company!”

  
Aw, and Rogal was hoping he wouldn’t have to fight today.

  
  


He drops the magic from his boots and plummets, dramatic, to the floor in a flurry of cloak and clanging greatsword. The- what he now assumes to be- Spy comes toward him, already drawing two daggers from their hips, shifting to spring from a wall toward his side.  
  
Rogal turns, greatsword coming up quick and spinning one dagger loose from a quick clip to the blade. He spins out of the path of the other, cloak swirling around him. The spy ducks under the broadside sweep he aims for their head, and comes up toward him with a sharp jab that Rogal knows he will not knock aside fast enough. It’s a dagger. It’s fine.

  
It sinks into the meat of his thigh and he grits his teeth against the burn, against Dolor’s bell-like ringing in his head, a laugh of maliciousness. He refuses to give into the bloodlust; instead, he kicks out with the newly-injured leg and pushes his assailant back, away from him. He pulls the dagger out of his leg in the moment of reprieve.

  
  
There is clanging from behind him.

**_“More.”_ ** Dolor warns, and Rogal turns, bloodied dagger still in hand, and then it isn’t. Because he’s thrown it perfectly into the throat of an emerging spy.

He has shed blood. Dolor is nowhere near satisfied. Rogal straightens up with a sear of black flame shifting across the wound in his leg, his eyes blank and dark and trailing shadowy mist from under the hood as he stares between his initial assailant and the newly-killed spy.

“I can and will lay waste to you.” He warns with the last thread he holds of his humanity under Dolor’s animalistic urges. The emerging spies back up immediately, dragging the body of their fallen comrade back with them. The first spy is not so smart. They make a charge for Rogal, and the thread of humanity snaps.

Rogal turns with unnatural speed, brings Dolor down in an overhead arch just as the spy’s hands graze his shoulders. There is no resistance. He does not even need to try. He bisects them, cleanly in halves, from the head down. He doubts they even felt a thing, as the two halves of their body slop messily to either side of him, showering him in the last heartbeat of blood.   
It pools around his feet, and he grimaces, stepping up into the air and out of the puddle he has left behind.  
  
Dolor drips blood until the blade is clean as new, repelling the blood like an oilskin with rain. Rogal sheathes the blade as he steps up onto a roof, and feels the surge of power he’d been riding on fade away, and when his shaking hands move to pull the blood out of his cloak, his magic is red again. It shivers and trembles around his fingers, but maintains itself long enough to clean him to an acceptable level. Finally clean, he stands on the roof and surveys the scene.

Two dead. One completely innocent- to his knowledge- the other’s only crime being that dread feeling, and one stab.  
He doesn’t doubt himself. He knows he does not get that heavy sensation without reason- realistically, the newly-bisected criminal was likely the lowest scum. A slaver, a murderer, who knows- but he can’t be one-hundred percent sure, and that haunts him. He lets out a shaking breath. Using Dolor usually ends in this way, with a bloodlust that he cannot resist. He should have known better.  
  
He steps across the roof to the other side, closer to the main street, and allows himself just to drop like a stone. He rolls when he hits the cobbles, knows that he’s sprained something in his left arm, but does not have the energy to think about it or even consider healing himself. He unlatches the buckles of his hood and drops it before making his way into the main thoroughfare, eyes exhausted and body heavy, moving back toward his friends. Hopefully, they’ll be able to cheer him up. He acknowledges nobody as he walks.


	7. And That's What You Missed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some tense exchange of information and revalations.

“I… what?” Rogal looks around his very full room, thoroughly wrung out and near tears, “Just… what happened here?”  
  


“What happened to _you?_ ” Carver squints at him, gesturing to Rogal’s own bed, “You look like you’re about to collapse.”  
  


Rogal laughs, the kind of tense laugh that drives worry all of the way up Carver’s spine like an electric shock.  
“Don’t ask.” Rogal warns. Carver narrows his eyes, but stands up to help Rogal unbuckle Dolor’s sheathe and untie the various laces of his cloak.  
  


“Go to sleep, then. Two of you are out, anyway. We’ll sort it out later.” Carver instructs, giving a gentle shove to Rogal’s shoulder in the direction of his bed, “I’ll go and buy a second room for Ashen and- Aoibheann?”  
  


“Vahn works,” Ashen says absently, then shakes himself, “Wait- what? I mean- you don’t have to- are we working together now?”

Carver looks up at him and gives him a genuine, tired smile,  
“I don’t think you’ll be fulfilling this contract, Phoenix.”

The effect is instant. In a split-second, with a heavy thud, Carver is pushed up against a wall with an arm across his shoulders and a knife held against his throat so tight that there’s a thin red line gently blossoming with blood.

“How the _fuck_ do you know who I am?”  
  


“ _Ashen!_ ” Lila chirps in alarm, scrambling to her feet. He turns and glares at her, golden lightning crackling at his fingertips in warning,  
  


“Don’t try anything. Either of you. Answer the question, Blackwood- how do you know who I am?”

Carver handles it well, really. He swallows against the cold, sharp knife edge.   
“You’ve worked for my family before,” he says, voice rough with stress but unshaking, “A couple of times, actually. Once, looking for my sister, Delilah. Once, looking for a rival family’s daughter.”  
  


“ _Name,_ ” Ashen snarls, though _Delilah Blackwood_ does ring a bell,  
  


“Alexandra Richter,” Carver answers, with just the barest hint of stress to his voice, “You found them both.”

Ashen remembers Alexandra Richter. She’d been a pain to take in, just as light-footed as he himself is, just as hard-hitting, and not alone. She’d gone down eventually, when he’d managed to lure her away from her party, and he’d delivered her to an older gentleman with Carver’s blank, tired eyes. Yes. He remembers now.

He steps back, lets the blade come away from Carver’s throat, to twin relieved exhales from Rogal and Lila. When he looks at them, Lila’s hands are dissipating green magic, and Rogal is upright and shaking with a scythe in trembling hands. The blade of which clangs as it drops to the floor, Rogal slumping sideways onto his bed. Ashen and Lila both startle and head toward him, though Ashen shoots a look over his shoulder at Carver,

  
“You keep your mouth closed. You say anything, and you’ll never speak again.”  
  


“Understood,” Carver swallows, and follows him to Rogal’s side. Lila is already there, heaving him onto the bed, leaving the scythe on the floor. She glows faintly green, frowning as she runs her hand over his arms and shoulders,  
  


“He was using the sword again…”  
  


“Not again,” Carver grimaces, picking the scythe from the floor and working on collapsing it down again, “He knows what happens.”  
  


“I know.” Lila worries her lip, “He just needs sleep. Like Vahn.” And she gestures at the other sleeping figure with a jerk of her shoulder, “They’ve worn themselves out, using too much magic.”

Carver sighs and stands straight, shaking the tension out of his shoulders and running his fingertips across the thin wound on his neck, sweeping the blood away. Lila pulls a face and reaches out,

“Hey, let me get that,” she tells him, setting a hand on his shoulder and focusing the waves of green toward the red line across his throat and slowly sealing it back up. It doesn’t scar, it’s shallow enough, but she still worries enough.  
  


“Thanks,” Carver pats her shoulder awkwardly, and stoops to pick a leather coin pouch from beside his bed, “I’ll see you in a minute.”

Carver makes his way downstairs with his breath coalescing in his chest. It takes no time at all to buy a second room for their new friends- acquaintances- heroes?  
Lila has seen a lot of flashes in the future. He’s seen her eyes turn to storm-ridden skies, seen the stars blink out in whatever it is to come, and he doesn’t want that. He doesn’t want Jester to have died for nothing. He doesn’t want to not save the world.

It shouldn’t be their problem, he thinks. There are a million other people that could save the world.

But it isn’t a million other people that Lila has seen tearing themselves to oblivion. It’s him. It’s them. She has seen the world rended apart, and she is so, so determined to stop it. Carver doesn’t know what he thinks anymore, but he’s come too far with Lila now to leave her to herself. She will do what she thinks will help, regardless of whether or not he’s there, and he’s grown close to her and to Rogal in the few weeks they’ve been travelling alongside one another.

He makes his way outside into the haze of the sunset across the thick mist that settles into the town at night. Into an alleyway, where he springs between walls with the aid of gravity’s release, a burst of green across his darkened form and he brushes a good ten feet above the roofs in the few split-seconds he gets to feel like he can breathe. The sunlight burning across the mists of the town is like a raging fire, rich in tones of red and orange, searing lines of yellow across the horizon.   
When he’s high up, he can see the very tops of the trees in the distance, and though they fade as he sinks back to the slates of the roof, the sight reminds him of a sense of false freedom.  
  
He’s not as light a touch as the spies are. He doesn’t land quite as neatly, doesn’t step quite as softly. But he walks anyway, gentle springs from one roof to the next and landing in rolls that sting his shoulder just the right amount to make him feel almost human again.

It is dark before he makes his way back toward the inn, is almost surprised to find a halo of moonlight seeping the orange from Aoibheann’s hair up on the roof, his tail waving slowly over the layers of slates with little more than a series of gentle clicks when it catches on ridges.  
  
He’s not surprised, but he knows that Aoibheann knows he’s arrived without looking. He can tell by the hitch and pause in the tail’s rhythm. He makes the last leap across the bridge between roofs, hand going for another green crystal from his side.

He comes up empty. He’s run out.

He realises this halfway across and descending, barely has time to open his mouth to worry before Vahn is whipping around with eyes flashing and a burst of cobalt surrounds Carver, tugging at his clothes and pulling him up with the lift of Vahn’s hand. The strain is evident, the sweat beading immediately on Vahn’s forehead as he pulls Carver up and over the roof to safety before he lets the exhaustion sweep over him and collapses face-first into the shingles, panting. Carver drops the few inches to the roof, just as panicked, and carefully trembles his way onto hands and knees to crawl over to where Vahn is laid out.

“Thanks,” He heaves as he draws up alongside Vahn, “Are you alright?”  
  


“Are you?” Vahn manages through heaving gasps, pushing up weakly onto one elbow. Carver gives him a weak, wavering smile,  
  


“I’m fine. Thank you.”  
  


“You already thanked me.” Vahn gives him a smile in return, then slumps back to the shingles with a heavy puff of air.  
  


“Do you need a hand?” Carver pulls himself to sit, and Vahn gives a broken little laugh,  
  


“I really want to say no, but I don’t think I can move.” he slurs from his place against the tiles, and Carver, somewhat hesitantly, leans over to tug the Hellborn into something of a sitting position. He has to hold him upright, and Vahn leans heavily on his shoulder, but he passes it off in his own mind. Vahn probably saved him from a broken ankle at least- it’s not a short three-storey drop.

It takes Vahn some time to recover enough to sit up on his own, and even then, he’s trembling vaguely in the moonlight. Carver pulls the key to Ashen and Vahn’s room from his pocket and hands it over,

  
“I should give you this and get you inside, so Ashen doesn’t have to be alone with Li and Rogal.” He says with a small smile, and Vahn gives a rough, choked-off laugh,  
  


“I think he likes them. Rogal hasn’t been very coherent since he woke up, but Li and her chickens are good company.” Vahn shakes his head, smiling, “He’s been swamped with chickens giving him attention since _I_ woke up.”  
  


“Are you- uh. Are you okay?” Carver doesn’t chance looking directly at him, just peeks from the corner of his eye. Vahn sighs, but his smile remains in place,

  
“I’m fine. Just- when Jester has to get physically- magically- involved, he uses my magic reserves. I don’t think he has his own anymore. He kind of overdid it today, even though it was necessary.”

There is a twinge of gratified irritation in the back of his mind that does not belong to him, and his smile twitches a little in amusement.

  
“Hm.” Carver gives as his only answer, fiddling and pulling a cigarette out of his pocket, searching for his matches.

  
  
He realises, a solid sixty seconds in, that he left them on his bed inside. He curses, dropping the hand with the cigarette, and Vahn’s head tilts in amusement,  
  
  


“Want me to get that for you?”  
  


“You have matches?” Carver looks up, hopeful. The moonlight illuminates the grey in his eyes, turning them bright silver in the night. Vahn opens his mouth to reply, but it gets lost along the way as his breath comes torn from his chest into the cool air.

Carver… is pretty. He’s not sure how he hasn’t noticed before now, maybe he’s been too determined to shoot to kill, but Carver is pretty. He’s not like Vahn, where the moonlight leeches the life from the colour in him; instead, the moonlight lends him an air of etherealness, a glow in the halo of night. Vahn swallows,

“Uh- no. I- um. Uh,” he pulls a hand up and clicks his fingers, summoning a tiny flame to his fingertip in a brief glow of cobalt blue. He offers his trembling hand, flame at the tip, out to Carver, unable to take his eyes off of the other man.   
Carver is distracted, murmuring a thanks as he lights his cigarette from Vahn’s flame and takes a relieved drag. Vahn dismisses the flame with little more than a quick clasp of his fist, smothering the fire in his palm. Even for such a minor feat, he feels exhausted. Carver gives him a sympathetic smile and a somewhat-awkward pat on the shoulder as he smokes. Vahn crumples in on himself to recover, and silence falls over the moonlit rooftops.

They don’t spend much longer out there once Carver has finished smoking. Instead, Vahn finds his arm being swung up around Carver’s shoulder, finds an arm around his waist, holding tight to his exhausted form. Carver flickers through his collection of crystals, and eventually decides on one of his limited supply of air magics, squeezing it in his palm and releasing the magic in a burst of lavender as he and Vahn drop off of the roof, are caught by a firm wind, and settle with little more than an _oof_.

“Thanks,” Vahn says, trying to pull away and walk himself. Carver lets him draw away, but ducks in the moment his legs give out under him to return them to their previous configuration. Vahn grimaces, but allows Carver to help him through the tavern of the inn, up the stairs, and to a separate room. Vahn’s hands tremble and the key jingles as he unlocks the door, and Carver has to help him into the dark space. Vahn murmurs a word, makes a gesture with a hand, lights the oil lamp on the table and immediately feels weakened by the effort. Carver gives a throaty chuckle as he eases Vahn down onto one of the twin beds,

  
“I could have gotten that.”  
  


“I forgot.” Vahn replies, flumping back onto the bed, “Thank you.”  
  


“It’s fine. I’ll send Ashen in- night, Aoibheann.”  
  


“Vahn,” replies the hellborn, with a weak smile from the bed, “Vahn is fine.”

Carver smiles over his shoulder, hand on the doorknob and turning,

“Goodnight, Vahn.” He says, and leaves, and in the moment of absence that follows, Vahn wonders how he ever thought he’d be able to kill him.

An image flashes through him, of Carver laid out on war-strewn fields of dying grass under an unnatural dark storm, red lightning flashing in narrow darts through the air in the background. Blood trickles from the corner of Carver’s mouth. He doesn’t know where the wound is, but he knows those eyes are empty and unblinking and past the point of resurrection. There’s another bright flash of red lightning, and Vahn jolts back into his own woozy body in his bed.

Cobalt dissipates around him, and he shudders with fear. It has been a while since he last had a vision of a future that could be. He doesn’t like this any more than he ever has.

He passes out, the weight of the day’s magic too heavy on his scarred soul.  
  
By the time Ashen eases his way into the room and closes the latch on the inside, Vahn is completely out cold, splayed out on his bed with his heavy leather coat still on. Ashen gives a little huff of annoyance, heads over to remove at least that and Vahn’s boots before he turns to his own bed and sits in a little flump that sends a couple of chicken feathers spiralling into the air. Routinely, he takes his things off- the longbow, first, propped up beside his bed with his quiver. The jacket comes next, then the belts of supplies of poisons and crystals and everything in between. Boots, set in their neat pair at the foot of the bed, bag set beside them.   
  
Ashen reaches out to the oil lamp and flicks the little switch that closes the cap, turns over in bed, and promptly goes the fuck to sleep.


	8. Lonely, With Company

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vahn reckons with the effects of Jester's pact on his life, for however long it may be.

Morning comes, again, in a burst of pale light.

Ashen wakes first in their room this morning, finds Vahn still splayed as he was last night and half-snoring. He gives a little snort of amusement, pulls his fletching supplies from the bag at the foot of his bed, and begins the careful work of fletching new arrows. He uses pine tar as the glue, long since run out of actual glue, especially since it’s expensive. Plus- it smells better. Fresh, free like the forest, sharp instead of gloopy and gross. The string to hold the feathers in place comes next, woven from flax with hair-thin strings of gold. He makes this himself, too, when he has the chance.  
The arrows he’s making this morning are special, the ones with a tiny indentation in them where he can fit a crystal. These are particularly nasty when they hit and burst _inside_ a person. They’re the kind Ashen reserves for killing.

It’s about an hour and a half before Vahn turns over, snorting himself awake with a chicken feather in the mouth. He coughs as he sits up, spitting and spluttering the feather away from him, scratching furiously at his face like a cat might.

“Sorry,” Says Ashen without any remorse in his voice, a slight smile on his face.  
He binds the string once more, tight, around the quills of the feathers, and watches the amber pine tar seep between the flax fibres and soak away. It’s always such a satisfying feeling, watching his work take to an arrow. It gives him a sense of fulfillment that he can’t seem to find anywhere else in life, a sort of power, a desperate grip on an anchor of the idea that something he makes might outlive him, might be good, that he might succeed. He can do this, this thing, it works. He can do other things, too, he thinks, when the tar solidifies into the string and seals the feathers in place. He can find people, he can bring them home, he can reunite families.   
One day, he believes, he’ll reunite his own.

Vahn has clambered out of bed and started changing into new clothes by the time Ashen sets his work down by the bed and stretches his way into being ready for the new day.

“Do you know what they’re trying to do?” He asks Vahn as he gets up and begins to get his own things together, “Li and the others?”  
  


“No idea,” Vahn admits, shaking his head, “All I know is that I can’t kill Carver. And you know what breaking a contract does in the _Ô'ayli's-perla_.” He looks over, eyes serious, to meet Ashen’s eyes, “Especially an assassin’s contract.”

Ashen swallows, nods. It’s unpleasant for him, when he can’t complete a contract. When the person is dead and wanted alive, when they’re too strong for him and he needs to bring in support. But it’s a reprimand and extra duties, for a retriever. There’s never really big punishments for admitting defeat for a retrieval.

Vahn has turned his back and is pulling his coat back on, buckling the many belts of his outfit across himself. He seems relaxed, but Ashen sees the tension pulled between his shoulder blades and the hair’s-breadth tremor across his arms and hands.

  
Assassins take their high-risk job because they have no choice.   
  
  
Assassins take their jobs when they have nothing else to lose but themselves. Some of them don’t even have that. Ashen has met Jonathan Collins, seen the empty would-be fear behind his eyes. If he was capable of being afraid, he’d surely be terrified. He and his band have nothing, at all, left to lose. They sacrificed their souls long ago.

Vahn has just found new things to lose. His life. Jester. Whatever this is, whatever Jester needs of him, he’s throwing himself right into the ravine to complete it and there’s a low chance he’ll crawl out again alive. If he does, it’ll be with a number of broken bones.

Vahn begins to work through some basic exercises Ashen has seen other Fire Mages go through before. Making a ring of fire that spins around him, drawing it away from anything it might hit, shrinking it, turning it to a string that he slips his gloved fingers into and draws out into a cat’s cradle. He clasps the drooling strings of flame in both hands and blows, gently, allowing the fire to burst into a wave of cobalt that spreads across his whole body. He shivers, sighs, and sits on the end of the bed to put his face in his hands.

  
“You alright?” Ashen asks, halfway through tying the laces of his shirt. Vahn gives out a noise that sounds something between a strangled laugh and a heart-wrenching sob.  
  
  
“I knew this would come, one day,” he says roughly, “that I’d lose everything because I’d do what Jester needed me for. But it came so suddenly, and I don’t- I don’t even know what they’re doing. Just that Jester wants me with them. With him. Carver.” he scrubs his face with his palms, aching everywhere, “And you’ve been dragged into it too.”

  
Ashen shakes his head, “I haven’t been _dragged_ into anything. I have other shit to do, people to find, Vahn. I can’t stick around.”

  
“People to find?” Vahn lifts his head, and Ashen swallows as he considers whether he should tell Vahn. He hasn’t told anyone in years.

_‘Jack,’_ Jester murmurs, with the sensation of a spectral hand on Vahn’s shoulder. Vahn opens his mouth, and in perfect time with Ashen,

“Jack,” they say together, and Ashen startles, wide-eyed, hand going for the bow at the edge of the bed. Vahn holds his hand up in the universal gesture of surrender,

  
“Whoa- Jester, remember?” he tries to placate as he finds an arrow levelled toward his throat,

  
“How does _he_ know?” Ashen does not draw back yet but does hold ready.

  
“I genuinely have no idea. I don’t know who Jack _is,_ but that’s- that’s who you’re looking for?”

Ashen pauses, squinting, considering, then lowers the bow. He doesn’t put it down, though, “Yeah. Jack’s- he’s my brother. He disappeared a few years ago. I’m going to find him.”

_‘This is the right way,’_ Jester urges in Vahn’s ear, _‘There’s answers with us.’_

“ _What_ answers?” Vahn gives aloud, half a growl, “This isn’t a time to be cryptic.”

_‘Where he is. Where to find him._ How _to find him.’_

“If you know all that, why can’t you just tell me?”

_‘Because you’ll need him to come with you if you want to survive.’_

“That’s bribery, Jester! Borderline blackmail!”

  
“What’s going on?” Ashen has raised his bow again.

_‘Don’t-’_ Jester warns, but Vahn cuts over him,

“Jester has answers. He knows where and how to find your brother. But he won’t _tell_ me, because we _need you to survive._ Which is blackmail.”

  
“I’ll do it,” Ashen says, immediate, dropping the bow down again and scrambling for his words, “I’ll do anything. Whatever it is. I’ll do it.”

  
“Ash, I don’t even-”  
  


“I don’t care!” Ashen throws one free hand up, “I don’t care what the _fuck_ I have to do to get him back, I’ll do it. If going with you is the best way to find out what happened, where Jack is- I’ll do whatever he fucking asks.”

Vahn stares, almost horrified, and he feels Jester’s wave of relief in the back of his mind. Not vindication, not gratitude- _relief._ Like he didn’t think that Ashen would, in fact, join them.

  
“Are you sure?” Vahn manages, after a minute or so of silence “We don’t know how dangerous this is going to be-”  
  


“I _said,_ I’ll fucking do it.” Ashen snarls the words with a ferocity Vahn hadn’t expected of him, “Don’t underestimate what I’ll go through.”

  
“I’m not trying to,” Vahn soothes, “Alright. If we both make it through this- if you want me to, I’ll come with you. When you go to find your brother. Not- not to intrude, but to help fight.”

  
Ashen eyes him, shoulders drawn up and back and, “I don’t know. I don’t know how I feel about- this, you, but. Maybe.”  
  


“The offer is there.” Vahn inclines his head and sweeps his endless satchel from the floor, “For now, I’m going to check on the others and get breakfast. Do you need anything?”

  
“Anything breakfast is good. Thank you, Vahn.”  
  


“Don’t thank me until I’ve fulfilled my part.” He grimaces, pulls the door open, and slips out. Ashen watches him go and tries, desperately, to hold tight to his emotions before they slip out and explode. Around him, the still air trembles like thunder in a storm.

  
  


Vahn knocks on Lila’s door at roughly ten-thirty, hoping beyond hope that at least one of them is already awake and he’s not disturbing them.

Rogal answers the door, trying for his usual bright smile, but looking somewhat run-down. Vahn knows that feeling.

“Oh, hey. Are you feeling any better?”  
  
  
“Yeah! Much!” Rogal says, and he’s pretty sure it’s the truth. Vahn eyes him. He doesn’t look great, he still looks exhausted, but he certainly looks better than unconscious.

  
“Well, that’s good at least. Hey, is- uh- nevermind. Do you need anything? I’m going out for breakfast.”

  
“Hm,” Rogal taps his chin thoughtfully, “I’d like breakfast. Sausages? They make very nice ones at the Alécreme bakery down the street. Oh-” he turns, looks over his shoulder, “Li! Carver! Vahn is going out to get breakfast, do you want anything?”

  
Vahn tries not to startle when he hears Carver’s name. They got in late last night. He expected him to still be asleep.

  
“I’d like some soup and bread, if that’s okay?” Lila’s voice comes chiming through, and Vahn nods when Rogal looks at him,

  
“Sure! Carver?”

  
“Hold on, I’ll go with him. Ask him to wait.” Carver replies, and Vahn, trying desperately not to look excited, leans against the door jamb. 

  
“I’ll wait.” He calls through, a smile almost in his voice, he crosses his arms. Rogal chatters with him amicably for the two or three minutes it takes for Carver to dress. Today, he seems to be tired, dressed in a simple white shirt and black pants, holding his cigarettes and matches in one hand as he joins Vahn in the hallway.  
  


“Hey,” Vahn greets as calmly as he can, jerking his chin a little, “Mornin’.”

  
“Morning,” Carver flashes Vahn a brief smile before turning to Rogal, “Sausage for you, soup and bread for Li. Anything else?”

  
“If you can find out what happened yesterday…” Rogal says, slowly, and Carver nods to cut him off before he can over-explain.  
  


“I’ll ask around as best I can.”  
  


“Thank you.” Rogal beams, and Carver smiles back as he takes a step backward, clear out of the doorway, and Vahn follows.

  
“See you later,” Carver raises a hand, and he and Vahn head out.

  
  
  


The streets are busy in the morning. Vahn walks slower than Carver does, has to jog every now and then to keep up, he’s too busy looking around. There’s so much to see, so many vendors, so many smells and sights! It’s been a good while since Vahn has had the opportunity to just… live life. He has this moment, now, caught between his old life and his new death to come- and he’s seizing it. He bounds up beside Carver, catching up as the human pulls ahead of him again,

“You walk fast.” He says, grinning, as he matches pace. Carver startles a little, and slows,  
  


“Sorry, I didn’t notice.”

  
“No worries.” Vahn chirrups, but is glad of the change in pace.   
There’s more time now to observe the people around him; he watches a little old lady as she whips red string around the stems of a bunch of flowers with practiced neatness, hands them off for two copper and a bright smile. He watches a young teenage girl string together fabric flowers on a thick needle, creating more of the beautiful crowns she has set up on her mother’s stall beside her. He watches ribbons dance, food vendors peddle their day-old pies, children chasing one another through the street.

When he turns back to Carver, he finds himself looking straight into the somewhat amused grey eyes of his new friend, and blushes immediately,

  
“What?” He goes on the defensive, immediately, and Carver gives a little snort of laughter,  
  


“You’re so impressed by everything. I know what that feels like- you haven’t had the chance to live much, have you?”

There are a few moments of silence between them, interspersed only with the sound of footsteps and the world around them. Vahn looks away, avoids Carver’s eyes.

  
“It’s okay.” Carver says, after a few moments with no reply, “I haven’t, either.”  
He lets the silence stretch a few more uncomfortable beats before he hesitantly reaches a hand out and puts it on Vahn’s shoulder, jolting them both to a halt. Vahn looks at him again, eyes wide and surprised and hand halfway to his gun.

“You’re not alone,” Carver says, quietly. Vahn freezes in place, completely lost. Carver’s eyes find his, and he waits.

For Vahn, time crawls in hour-long seconds. He feels his fingertips brush cold gold, he feels Carver’s heart in his words, he feels an absence in his chest. Like his heart has been taken, but it’s been gone a long time. And he’s only just feeling the loss.

There’s a burn, a raging pain that surges through him as he realises he’s tearing up, teeth gritted, and Carver’s expression turns hurt and guilty.

Vahn finds himself being pulled into a hug. Carver rests his cheek to the side of Vahn’s head, holds his arms around Vahn’s shoulders, loose but warm. Vahn is still stunned, one arm hovers out to their right, one crushed between himself and Carver, cringing away from the cold metal of his gun.

  
Seconds pass. Moments. The noise of the world disappears into a rush of blood, into the sound of everything coming crumbling down on top of him.

  
Carver holds him as he cries. He seems awkward, but genuine, as Vahn manages to regain control of his arms and clings to Carver with the desperation of a man drowning at sea, clutching to the last piece of driftwood.

Carver isn’t sure what went wrong here, but he holds onto Vahn anyway. Waits, for minutes, in the middle of the crowded street with people brushing past them. Vahn cries himself hoarse and silent, face pressed to Carver’s shoulder. When he finally catches his breath and steps back, hiccuping, Carver gives him a smile.

  
“Are you okay?” he asks, hands still resting on Vahn’s shoulders. Vahn sniffles, face puffy and swollen, eyes still damp.  
  


“That- uh,” he tries, voice thick, “Nobody’s ever hugged me before.”  
  


“Uh- what?” Carver is stunned, eyes wide, and Vahn gives an almost-guilty nod, avoiding Carver’s eyes, hands pulled in to his chest. Carver doesn’t know quite how to respond. He thinks about it, he tries to find the right words, he tries to figure out what will make this right.

He doesn’t find it.

Instead, he just pulls Vahn back in, closes his eyes and rests his cheek to Vahn’s hair.

  
“You’re not alone,” Vahn says, quiet and scratchy, leaning into the hug.  
  


“You’re not alone.” Carver agrees in a murmur.

It is the first time Vahn has ever felt like he has a chance to live.


	9. Dissonance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Whilst part of the party gathers information, Vahn's experiments with explosives go a little awry...

Ashen  _ could _ use his magic to get up to the roof. It’d be easier than scrambling up the side of the building, but nowhere near as fun; he finds he loves the physical sensation of the burn in his shoulders and arms, pulling himself up by the fingertips and clutching to narrow ridges, feeling damp moss under his palm and hoping the tangled ivy vines will hold his weight. They do, long enough for him to catch the edge of the roof and swing himself like a pendulum until he can roll onto the tiles and stare at the spots of fluffy white clouds in the crisp blue sky above. The air is chill and fresh, the scent of food and flame from the street below curling up to him in slow wisps. He spreads his arms out on the rooftop and lets himself breathe for what feels like the first time in forever.

He counts seconds until he loses track, stares at the sky until the sun gets too close to its apex for him to keep his eyes there, then closes them. For the first time, he has a chance to find information on his brother. For the first time, he may be able to talk to Jack again. He doesn’t doubt that whatever Jester wants to put him through will be dangerous, and he doesn’t trust Vahn, but he’s desperate. He’ll take it, anything.

He stays up there for a few hours, until he hears Vahn’s voice in the street below, hears the raucous laughter that follows him wherever he goes. Then, he sits up and scurries down the side of the building, slipping in and closing the window to their shared room as Vahn opens the door. He calls a goodbye to a Carver that Ashen can’t see from the room, then steps in, letting the door swing closed, to hand Ashen what should have been breakfast, is more like cool lunch.

  
“Sorry,” Vahn says, grinning, “We got distracted.”  
  


“Have you been crying?” Ashen quizzes, taking the paper from his gift pretzel and studying it appreciatively before he takes a bite. Vahn laughs awkwardly, one hand going automatically to his face to touch at his cheeks. His eyes and face are still somewhat warm and puffy, and the brief glances he’s caught tell him he’s flushed, too.

Still, he’s not sure how much of that is the tears, and how much is... 

  
“Vahn?” Ashen breaks the thought process before he gets too close to things he won’t admit, and Vahn turns to smile in his direction,  
  


“Sorry! Yeah, I- um- I had a bit of a breakdown earlier,” he sits on his bed and withdraws a handful of supplies from his pocket, pushing himself back and crossing his legs to get to work, “See, I’ve never- nobody’s ever hugged me before? And I was sort of upset about other things, so Carver- Carver gave me a hug. And because that’s never happened-”

  
“Ah,” Ashen nods at the awkward break in his words, understanding perfectly, “Yeah, I get that. Sort of? I mean- Jack, he was around, but it’s been a while and- yeah. I get you.”  
  


“Thanks,” Vahn smiles up at him before turning his eyes back to the strips of metal in his hands. 

Like paper, he begins folding carefully, until it makes itself into a little origami star shape. He murmurs a word, summons a thin sheet of flame over one fingertip and begins to feed his solder into the gaps in the metal, closing them off. He leaves the little gap between two points at the top, shakes the flame off with a dim sparkle of blue, and blows gently on the little star to cool it. From the other side of the room, Ashen watches, intrigued, chewing his way through his pretzel.   
Vahn is meticulously careful with these things. He gently puts the star on his knee, reaches into the endless satchel, and wills his alchemy supplies to him. He removes a heavy, hand-sized leather pouch embossed with some word in Elvish that Ashen doesn’t know. Set aside, he goes back to the kit and, with  _ much _ more care, picks out a much smaller, blue-stained leather sachet with little silver stars embossed into it. He closes the rest of the kit back up and sets it aside, retrieves a tiny funnel, spoon, and a pair of tweezers with rubber tips.   
  
One by one, he drops these tiny little balls of what appears to be gummy blackness into the star, picking them carefully up with the rubber tipped tweezers and pushing those in the little gap carefully.   
  
Then, he sets the funnel into the hole, pulls a spoon of grey powder from the heavier satchel, and tips it in. He does this twice more before he taps everything down, sets his powders aside, and lifts the star to blow away any residual powder. He picks up his solder, startles, and looks over to Ashen,

  
“Sorry, I totally forgot you were here. You might want to duck behind something, in case this goes wrong.”

Ashen doesn’t question, just scrambles off of his sheets and tucks under the bed as Vahn summons his little sheet of flame again and leans in to focus on his work. Ashen chances a peek from under the protective layers of the sheets, watching as Vahn very carefully solders the hole closed, avoiding heating the metal as much as possible. At the last moment, he slips a little wick in and seals around it, dispersing the flame and shaking his hand to dispel the magic, studying the star. He waits a few long, long seconds with bated breath, until the metal cools enough that he’s pretty sure it’s safe.

  
“I’m done, you’re alright.”  
  


Ashen shimmies out from underneath and takes his place back on the bed, gesturing to the little star that Vahn sets aside as he begins work on another one.   
  
“What was that?”

  
“It’s a literal firework star,” Vahn flashes Ashen a smile, “A small one, but still. It’s mostly made for aesthetics, but it comes in handy as a flashbang if I need a distraction.”  
  


“I’d think. How many do you have?”  
  


“That’s my third finished one,” Vahn gestures, “I’ve only made six or so. They’re kind of dangerous to make, what with the…” he waves the solder with one hand, rolls his eyes, and goes back to folding the metal into shape. He’s decided just to make a handful of shells, then solder, then fill each of them in stages. He puts off the dangerous parts until last.

By the time he’s ready to move onto soldering, it’s early evening. Ashen has long since left with his longbow to hunt with Rogal in the nearby forest, and Lila has taken off into the town to pick up supplies.

This leaves Vahn sitting in his room alone, and Carver in the next, smoking out of his window.

It takes time for Vahn to notice the curls of smoke on the breeze past his window, and by the time he does, he’s setting a wick into the third of six stars, waiting for the solder to take. He gets just a little too distracted as he looks up, out, knowing it’s Carver’s smoke instinctively, he wonders if he should open the window. If Carver would look over and notice him there. He imagines smiling out into the sunset, nonchalant, imagines Carver catching sight of the relaxed smile and folded arms and being stunned. He imagines that, for once, maybe, possibly-

Somebody could want him?

He doesn’t notice the flicker of his emotions taking to his hands until it’s too late.

_ What’s that noise? _ Is the last coherent thought Vahn remembers having before he looks down at the dim orange glow of the lit wick burning into the star.

Carver has just taken a deep drag of his cigarette, sat on his windowsill three floors up, when he hears the dull explosion from next door. It’s followed momentarily by a thud, the sound of shattering glass, and then a dead silence.

He’s on his feet in the window in moments, cigarette abandoned into the street, and he’s pulling an earth crystal from his pocket as he steps directly into thin air.

It flashes Lila’s green and he slaps a hand to the wall as he begins to fall, and uses the gravity manipulation like a suction to shift and swing over to Vahn’s window, where shards of glass are still crackling and falling. The window has been blown outward, the sound of crackling still vibrant in the air, and there’s trails of dark smoke pouring from the void. Carver shifts himself in, carefully avoiding the shards of glass, waving away the smoke. He sucks in a breath as he spots Vahn, slung out across one of the beds, smoking gently. There are a few wounds across his face that are dripping blood, but nothing is gushing as far as Carver can see.   
  
He coughs his way through the smoke and over to Vahn, kneeling on the bed beside him and setting a hand gently to one shoulder.   
Carver isn’t an expert at healing, certainly nowhere near enough to fix this, but it’s enough to scope out what’s wrong. He’s relieved to find that it’s mostly burns and bruising, the former could have been much worse if Vahn’s own magic didn’t make him naturally resistant to flame. There are a few cuts from where pieces of shrapnel had come close to sticking in his skin, but not quite made it; he can see the shards in the wall behind Vahn, and in the ceiling when he looks up. There’s nothing serious that he can feel, so he chooses instead to scoop Vahn up into his arms and stumbles his way back through into his own room, away from the smoke and the soot-blackened bedding, into somewhere relatively safer. As soon as one of their friends is back, he’ll head down and pay off the inn owner, but for now, he really doesn’t want to leave Vahn alone. Just in case.

He sets Vahn down on his own bed, gently unbuckles the belts and anything that could be harmful, sets it on the floor. Then he pulls himself up, sits against the headboard, and waits.

Dusk is setting in when Vahn shifts for the first time, but it isn’t to wake up. Instead, he snuffles a little, whines quietly, and Carver turns his head so fast he feels something crack. Just in case something’s wrong.

It doesn’t seem to be; Vahn is just feeling the pain now, and a frown creases his brow whilst he sleeps. He wriggles on the wall side of the bed, and Carver breathes a sigh of relief as he shifts himself so he can double his duvet over his sleeping friend. Vahn snuggles into it, wriggles a little more, until he rests his head on one of Carver’s legs. This seems to satisfy him, as he gives out a little contented sigh, and settles back to sleep. Carver, absentmindedly, pets Vahn’s hair, leaning back against the headboard to go back to reading.

When Lila arrives just as true night is setting in, she’s accompanied by three of four chickens, chattering to them amicably. She’s surprised to find the room dark, and just as surprised to find Vahn still asleep on Carver,

“Hey, Peanut,” he greets the lead chicken, who clucks happily. He then turns his attention to Lila, “There was a… small explosion. Could you do me a favour?”

And that’s how Lila ends up apologising profusely in a mixture of elvish and common, pushing a little leather satchel of roughly one-hundred and fifty gold coins across the bar. The keeper looks irritated about the damages, but won’t complain when he’s being massively overpaid for a window and some cosmetic damages. It’ll cost him sixty, seventy gold at most.

As Lila turns to leave the bar, there’s clucking from her feet, scraping from the door, and she looks down to beam at Peppercorn,

“Oh, hi!” She coos, and looks up from the chicken to her friends as they trail in, covered in mud and scrapes and the odd leaf. Rogal holds a leather bag that she knows stores catches when they have them, but it seems to already be empty- they must have traded off their prey in the market square before arriving. Rogal waves brightly as he wipes the mud on his boots off onto the welcome mat, scythe collapsed and in hand. Behind him, Ashen does the same, closes the heavy wooden door behind him, and follows through the shallow sea of tavern patrons to Lila’s side. She’s picked Peppercorn up, now, is holding her under one arm like a ball.

  
“There was a bit of a problem with your room, Ashen,” She sort of frowns, looking more apologetic than anything, “You’ll probably have to stay with us tonight.”

  
Ashen puts his face gently into one gloved hand,  
  


“Did Vahn explode?”

  
“I think so! I just got back, he’s all black and dusty and asleep on Carver. Sorry.”  
  


“You don’t need to apologise, Li, don’t worry.” He gives her a smile, faintly, and she returns it though she recoils, “What?”

  
“You, um,” She gestures to his glove, “You have a sort of handprint? Of- um… blood. Right here.” She circles the centre of her own face sheepishly and Ashen… just groans.

  
“Of course. Great.” He groans slightly, and makes for the stairs, “I’ll see you guys in a second, then, I’m heading to the restroom.”  
  


“See you soon!” Rogal waves after him, smiling. When Ashen has disappeared, however, he turns to Lila again with his expression turning somber,

  
  
“Did you find anything?”  
  


“I did,” Rogal says, and makes a gesture to follow him up the stairs. Peppercorn and Aubergine follow diligently, the former now put firmly on the floor. Lila takes the steps two at a time.

  
“What? Rogal?”

  
“You know Dolor?” Rogal looks over his shoulder briefly, but finds himself unable to make eye contact,

  
“Your sword? Yes. What about him?”  
  


“Well,” says Rogal, and laughs a little, “He’s… special. See, the contact in the forest was- um- well. He had a  _ brother _ of Dolor’s, which was a scythe, called Metunt. Apparently there are seven siblings, all like Dolor, all evil.”

  
“And what does that have to do with the Glimmer realm?” Lila cocks her head, Rogal sighs with his hand on the handle of the door to their room,  
  


“It’s- on their list, Li. One of them got free, and Basil doesn’t know how far behind they are, but it’s on their list. Because of the Keys.”

Lila sucks a breath through her teeth, and Rogal opens the door. Vahn is still asleep on Carver, to little surprise. What does surprise them, however, is that Carver seems to have fallen asleep too. Slouched up against the headboard, his book dropped to the side of him, breathing rhythmic and slow.

“I’ve never seen him sleep this calmly,” Li whispers, creeping across the room to strike a match and light the lantern. Rogal hums an agreement, heading to his own bed to switch his clothes out. He plans on getting a brisk wash down before properly changing into his pyjamas, though, and he needs to wait for Ashen to get back before he can go.

  
“Do you want help picking the sticks out of your hair?” Lila asks, two chickens sat in her lap but her attention on her friend. She’s worried about him. Rogal flashes her a quick smile,

  
“Thanks, that would be great.”

Ashen swaps out with Rogal soon after, hefting the mostly-clean duvet from his own room into Lila’s and tossing it to the clearest section of floor. Lila hands him two of her four pillows, and he thanks her, before they all bed down for the night.


	10. The Adventure Begins

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A distant tragedy drives the group to begin their travel slightly earlier than planned...

Morning comes, and with it arrives a veritable whirlwind of planning. They weren’t thinking of leaving this fast, that much is true, but it seems they have little choice.

As they dress in the morning, Rogal tells them about a distant group of almost-heroes that had fallen just short of saving everything. And in falling down that last hurdle, in their deaths, an evil had come.

“Basil called it Vastum,” Says Rogal, pulling on his gloves, “And it sounded nasty. From what he knows, it apparently took over their strongman’s mind and controlled him for a while… and after he died, they were lost. This Vastum tore them apart…” he looks to the sheath that holds Dolor, swallows. He doesn’t want to believe that anything is truly past saving, and even though Dolor is bloodthirsty, he’s always been… helpful, to Rogal. Sort of, anyway. Dolor warns him of danger, keeps him safe, if Rogal isn’t skilled enough for a fight- well, Dolor is ancient.

“Dolor could do the same,” he admits, “Basil told me that Dolor is- ah… what was it?”  
  


“A claw.” Ashen answers grimly, “I was in the tree right above you. A claw of Caertium, all seven of them are.”  
  


“Oh,” says Rogal, a little put off by Ashen’s confession. He’s taken to behind their screen to change, and Rogal doesn’t blame him. Vahn is sat up on Carver’s bed, shirt unbuttoned and ruined gloves, hissing quietly as Lila and Carver apply some sort of aloe gel to soothe the burns. He refuses to let them at his back, though.  
  


“But why does that make this such an emergency? And why is it important to me?” Lila glances over, frowning a little, “Why is it important to the Keys and the Glimmer Realm?”  
  


“Ah, that. Well. I _think_ that Vastum is trying to free Caertium from Shyklvathys, but it’s hard to do that without killing all of the lynchpins and destroying all of the relics. So he’s found an easier way- a hole, in the Lunar Realm. If he can tear it open wide enough-”

  
“It’ll let Caertium through.” Carver freezes, turns, wide-eyed, “And then he can just come through the Gateway. He can devour the dimensions.”  
  


“Exactly.” Rogal nods once in his direction, “And the Glimmer Realm is first on the list to collect the Key for.”

Carver puts his face in his one clean hand and gives a breath that shakes in his lungs. It’s not a sob, but it could _so easily_ be. Vahn lifts one stiff, painful arm, sets it onto Carver’s shoulder.

“Hey,” he says, and his voice is still husky from the soot and the bruising and the pure force of a tiny bomb going off in his hands, “Hey.”

Carver looks up from his hand, finds his other hand still hovering over Vahn, trembling, and Vahn’s grip on his shoulder tightens fractionally.

“You’re not alone.” Vahn tells him, firm, quiet, with no room for argument or doubt.

  
“We’re with you,” agrees Lila, “And you’re with us. This is why Jester died, isn’t it? To put the sun-heart back. The key.”  
  


“I think so.” Carver admits, “I didn’t know a lot. I- he was _my brother,_ I should have known. I can’t let him die for nothing.”

  
“You won’t,” Vahn says, feels Jester’s presence settle on him and feels the anguish of his guardian spirit at his side, “ _We won’t._ ”

There’s an echo within his words, Jester’s voice a thousand miles away and ricocheted, Vahn’s hand shakes on Carver’s shoulders. He knows his eyes are red. He knows that Jester just wants to comfort his little brother. He doesn’t mind that it hurts.

“Jester, stop that! He can’t handle it!” Lila scolds, pushing Vahn’s head gently with her goop-covered hand. Vahn shakes his head as Jester drops away immediately, chuckling,

“You intimidated a ghost into backing off,” He tells her, turning his smile her way, “I’m glad you’re on our side.”

  
  
  


Less than an hour later, the group is up and out. Vahn is still stiff and painful, dressed in one of Carver’s looser cotton shirts and his heavy oilskin cloak, pulled tight around his shoulders. He’s uncomfortable when he can’t wear his gloves, but his skin is still sticky with aloe, and he knows from experience how gross it is to get pulmices in his leather gloves.

Carver stays at his side as they make their way out of the town.

Rogal seems to know where they’re going, ahead of the group with his scythe out and slashing through the air, clearing vines and branches. The more Vahn watches, the more problems he notices.

The scythe collapses, sure, but it’s non-functional when it’s collapsed. It’s essentially just a big blade, and it’s not built for combat, either. It’s too long and too curved, more like a harvesting scythe. The handle is too long, the blade too much on the inside. He begins making plans in his mind as they walk, what he has the time and materials for. Something lightweight, so perhaps a tin-titanium alloy of some kind? How much can he mechanise it? He doesn’t have a particularly large amount of gears left.  
He’s working on where he could pin each slat of metal when Lila holds up a hand to halt them,

“We’ve been walking long enough, we need to eat.” She tells Rogal, a few metres ahead of the group and scrambling up a large, mossy rock to look over the treetops.  
  


“I’ll be down in a second,” he answers, and Lila seems to take it as an agreement, because she pulls a blanket from her bag and spreads it out over the leaf-strewn forest floor.   
  
She waves a hand at a patch of nettles, and a sphere of green appears around them. She strains, as though lifting something heavy, and the nettles come away, float a few metres away, and then plop down, mostly unharmed. She beams at them as she takes a seat, and Ashen smiles silently, becomes the first to join her on the mat.  
Vahn and Carver sit together, and Rogal joins them a minute or so later as Lila is handing out their food. It’s simple travelling rations, bread, cheese, dried meats, and hardtack. But it’s food, and it’s good, and Vahn is pretty sure he hasn’t eaten this finely in weeks. He’d devour it, if he could move fast enough.

The others are amused by his excitable anxiety, taking more care with their own food. Ashen makes a sort of cheese sandwich, cutting into his cheese chunk with a small pocket knife. Rogal drinks his water before he eats. Lila hands her meat rations off to Carver in exchange for his hardtack.

“You don’t like dried meat?” Ashen asks, gesturing, as it swaps hands. Lila gives him a friendly little smile,  
  


“I’m a vegetarian! I don’t eat meat, so I swap.”  
  


“Oh,” Ashen says, almost awkwardly. He’d been planning on hunting later, for fresh meat, but he’s not sure how Lila would take it…  
  


“It’s okay! I know you guys eat it, and that’s fine! I just personally don’t, because that’s what my moms taught me.”  
  


“You have more than one mom?” Ashen asks incredulous, with a wondrous noise of agreement from Vahn, cheeks packed full, “I don’t even have one mom.”  
  
Vahn waves his relation.

  
“I have a few moms!” Lila replies eagerly, “One of them is a crow when she’s not in the Glimmer Realm, one of them is my aunt, but she does the same job! And her wife, too- they all brought me up. My moms are called Iona and Rachel, I have a mom that is also a crow, My aunt is Sabra, her wife is Minerva.”

  
“Lucky.” Ashen half-laughs, shaking his head.

  
“Share,” Vahn adds through a mouthful of food, and Lila turns to smile at him,

  
“If you met them, they’d probably be happy to be your moms too! They’re really nice like that.”

Vahn chokes on his bread, and Carver has to gently pat his back until he can breath again.

  
  


They take back to the unbeaten path, with Rogal ahead still cutting through the branches in their way.

“Where _are_ we going?” It’s Ashen to ask, much to Vahn’s relief, and Rogal turns briefly to scrutinise him before returning to his cutting,  
  


“ _Well,_ we need to make a stop in at the Alabaster Boscage first, so that Li can see her moms. But from there, we’ll go to… hm, probably Treawe, to catch a boat. Which key do you think we should hide, Li?”

  
“Why not the Glimmer Key? I already know where that is.”

  
“Because, you’re the Glimmer princess. It would be obvious to assume that you had it.”

  
“I guess.” Lila rolls her eyes, “Besides, I think there’s more going on that just that! Remember those things I’ve been seeing, about the sun going dark, and the stars burning out?” She asks, and Rogal gives a hum of assent. Ashen and Vahn share a concerned expression.

  
“You’ve been seeing things? Or _Seeing_ things?” Vahn asks, and Lila turns, curious at the inflection of that word. Her elven ears prick with interest, and she drops back to walk beside Vahn with a quiet command to her chickens to stick to Rogal,  
  
  
“ _Seeing_ ,” she says, “I See things. You know what I’m talking about?”

  
Vahn nods, nervous, fiddling with the hem of his cloak, “Yeah. I didn’t know you were a Seer.”

  
“Yes you did,” Ashen points out, “You told me, the first night we were watching them.”

Vahn tries to remember, really racks his brains,

“When was that?”

Another concerned look is shared, this time between Lila and Ashen,

“What do you mean _when?_ It was maybe three days ago. The night before Jester happened.”

  
“I, uh,” Vahn turns an interesting shade of red, ducking his face into the folds of his cloak, “I don’t remember. I just- I’m- I wouldn’t say I’m a _Seer,_ but I See things, sometimes.” and grimaces as he remembers his vision of Carver. He’s not wholly sure about his visions, but he’s terrified he won’t be able to avoid it.

The man himself sets a hand on Vahn’s shoulder as his eyes turn distant, shocks him back into his body,

  
“I forget things, too,” he murmurs, it’s solely for Vahn, and the others politely pretend that they don’t hear, “It’s alright. You’re not alone.”

  
“That’s not what I’m worried about-” Vahn gets out before there’s frenzied clucking and a shout from Rogal up ahead. When they look, he’s nowhere to be seen, but the spot he should have been is all bouncing leaves and shuddering vines.

  
“ _Rogal?_ ” Lila calls in a panic, going to rush forward. She’s lucky enough that as her foot begins to sink into the hidden pitfall, something secures itself around her wrist in a burst of pain, and she’s yanked back.   
She falls flat on her ass in the leaf litter, and Vahn kneels beside her to carefully unwrap her wrist from the whip he has clutched in one white-knuckled, shaking hand.  
  


“Careful,” he says, and his voice shakes along with his fingers.  
  


“Pitfall,” Lila answers, fingers going to her wounded wrist as soon as the whip lets go. There’s a red ring of welt and a couple of small lacerations where the tips of the tails had caught her flesh, but given that Rogal hasn’t replied, she can only assume that she got off luckier than he did.  
  


“Hold on, stand back,” Vahn commands, tucking his whip back into his pocket. He waits until Lila has scrambled up and gotten behind him before he lets himself exhale, slowly, focusing. He pushes forward, plants one foot in the loamy earth, firmly, and swings his hands around in a wide arch, thumbs pressed together. Fire trails from his palms, coating his skin, and he grimaces at the feeling of it. It won’t harm him, though; his magic makes it far more difficult to burn him that a normal person, and he’s confident in his control. He gestures with a cobalt blue flair in his eyes and on his skin, draws the flame out into a line, loops it into a circle and makes those familiar gestures with his hands. As though manipulated by the fingers of giants, the loop crisses and crosses in mid-air, forming a cat’s cradle. With all the care in the world, he lowers it into the vegetation,

  
“Keep the air clear, Ashen,” he says over his shoulder as plumes of smoke begin pouring from the underbrush. Ashen gives a nod that Vahn doesn’t see, and turns a circle, drawing the same around him in the air in a chain of bright gold. The roots of his hair glow with his eyes, the magic slowly beginning to turn them gold once more. It’s been a long time since he’s done anything as strenuous as this, a contained whirlwind whipping the smoke out of the air around himself, Carver, Lila, and her chickens.  
He can barely see Vahn through the whip of the smoke, but he knows that he’s struggling. It’s an amusement, in their organisation- ex-organisation- that Zephyr is a Fire Mage that finds it hard to control his own flame. And less amusingly, but ironic to those that know, that Phoenix is an Air Mage that struggles with the wind.   
  
(Ashen much prefers to use lightning anyway.)

Outside the whirlwind, Vahn finds himself panting with the effort it takes to control his flame, to keep it small. And when he feels he’s burned away enough undergrowth, it takes all the more effort to take the flame away, to squash it smaller, smaller, and dismiss it. There’s a burst of warmth, but it isn’t fire, and that’s a win. Vahn collapses to his knees, exhausted, and Ashen shifts the wind to blow outward in a shell shape, clearing as much smoke as he can. Thankfully, there are no embers to re-ignite. Vahn has been very thorough in his work.

  
Carver is at Vahn’s side before the wind has truly dispersed, kneeling with a hand to his shoulder. Lila has already darted to the edge of the newly-revealed ravine, peering over the edge. She lets out a little shriek, and Ashen shifts over to her as Carver helps Vahn to his feet, puts Vahn’s arm around his shoulders just as he had the night on the roof.   
  


“What’s wrong? Is he okay?”

  
“No.” Ashen grimaces, and jumps straight down into the ravine.


	11. Divergence

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Our perspective pulls from our heroes to a place thousands of miles away...

Many miles away, an ancient clock trapped without the time to tick is taken from a table by a small, green hand. Its owner, a goblin swathed in a heavy cloak the colour of midnight, pulls it in toward them. They inspect it at arms length for a moment, noting the time it records- Three and a half minutes after assumedly midday- then pull it closer, into the little circle of light that should be the shadow of their cloak. The second the clock crosses the threshold, there is the sound of whirring, creaking as the aged clockwork comes back to life, spinning and crackling as it speeds through years of solitary stillness. The goblin counts the spins with perfect calculation, observing each spin and click and turn.

“Seven years,” they murmur into the perfectly still air around them, “I’m so sorry, Ian.”

They sigh, drawing the cloak tighter around them so that they can look at the design on their shoulders. As they do, one of the little gears outlined in gold flickers and dims, leaving maybe ten of the hundred or so left. The goblin winces, turns and looks over their shoulder.

They’re a good eight minutes out from the edge, at full, direct speed.

This is the only temporal sheath left.

Their friends cannot afford to lose it.

They casts a plaintive look at their old friend, Ian. He’s frozen in this time-abandoned cityscape, turned with his head over his shoulder and holding a young child by the arm. It seems he was caught whilst fleeing, so close to the edge.

His cloaked friend does not doubt that he was caught only because he stopped to help. It breaks their heart that they cannot save him.

“I’ll come back for you.” They promise, setting a hand on Ian’s arm for just a moment and trying not to be unnerved by the unnatural, marble-cold of his skin.

With that not-moment passed, the cloaked goblin turns, breathes, and allows their magic to cloak them in a heavy sanguine glow. They are already exhausted, but they cannot get trapped here.

They take a step and move like light through the darkness of this timeswept place, an incredible pace that will still have them cutting it close. Winding around the streets, burning themself clean out of magic as they teleport over obstacles. Five minutes pass. They have three and a bit gears left at the bottom corners of their cloak. The edge of the grey is in sight in the distance.

They increase their pace.

They see their friends on the other side, a tiny cluster of people huddled together with their eyes on their cloaked ally as they move. At the head, a little golden half-dragon with glowing blue eyes, a hand reached out to them.

The last of their gears begins to fade.

They burst out of the grey, rolling in dissipating sanguine glow and gasping for air, their hood dragging atop them. Immediately, they are surrounded by friends and allies. One picks them up and uncouples the cloak from around them, letting it fall.

“Rosie,” the half-dragon says as they come up beside her, pulling a waterskin from their pocket and handing it to one of the humans holding her upright, “Are you okay?”  
  


Rosie gasps for air and nods weakly, taking the offered drink eagerly. She is too weak to drink herself, so she allows the human holding her to pour it slowly into her mouth until she makes a vague noise to stop.  
  


“Did you find him?” The half-dragon asks, eyes wide, as they pick up and fold the gear cloak. Rosie gives him a weak smile and nod, and the whole group brightens a little, murmurs of excitement spreading across them.

  
“And how long it’s been?”

This question is met with silence and trepidation, the murmurs dying out immediately,

“Azer,” says the human holding Rosie upright, “Give her time to recover-”

  
“Yes.” Rosie cuts them off, “Alistair. Okay. Yes.” she pants her way through the words, Alistair does not argue with her, he knows better than to try. She catches her breath, and, “Seven… years.”

  
“Seven,” Azer murmurs, turning back to the bubble of world that time abandoned, “ _Seven._ ”  
  


“It could have been worse.” Alistair grimaces, and Azer nods in agreement,  
  


“Certainly. Still, seven years is far long enough. Come on- let’s get Rosie somewhere safe to rest. We’ll go out to recharge the sheath later.”

There are murmurs of assent, and Azer is the one to take Rosie’s arm over his shoulders, out from Alistair’s withering gaze. He fixes the human with a firm glare. A warning to back off.   
Alistair says nothing, follows, but continues to brood from the back of the little group.


	12. Return to the End

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We come back to find out what happened with Rogal...

Ashen springs between the edges of the ravine, carefully bursting bits of his magic to slow his descent. He reaches Rogal and pins himself between the walls, panting as he inspects his new friend. The bottom nearly drops out of his stomach as he realises that Rogal, in fact, did not hit the bottom of the ravine about ten feet below.  
And thank the Gods above that he didn’t. Directly below him are sharp stalagmites, stretching up toward them a good three feet tall. If Rogal had fallen, there would have been no chance at saving him.

Instead, from Ashen’s brief inspection, he seems to have hit his head hard on the rock on the way down and now hangs, unconscious. And what caught him- Dolor, embedded a good six inches into the stone, having twisted and torn unnaturally through the thick leather of its sheath.   
If it weren’t for the sword…

“Ashen!” Lila calls, and when he looks up, he sees her face looming over the edge. She’s wide-eyed, terrified, “How is he?”

Ashen gives a shaking breath and very carefully reaches around to feel for Rogal’s pulse. His hands shake.  
He feels.   
He hopes.   
He begs.

He feels it! Weak, too fast, but a pulse is there. They can still save him.

“Not good!” Ashen shouts back up, “He’s not dead, but he’s close! The sword stopped him from being impaled a dozen times. I think he must have hit his head, it’s bleeding a lot!”  
  


Lila worries her lip, staring down into the ravine. Vahn creeps up cautiously beside her to watch, and she calls down,  
  


“Can you carry him out?”  
  


Ashen shakes his head, “There’s no way! We’d fall too far before I got my magic up strong enough, and we can’t risk moving him like this! He needs to be stabilised first!”  
  


“Can you heal?” Lila asks, dread pooling in her stomach.  
  


“No,” Ashen frowns up, “I- I’m sorry.”  
  


“Alright. Hold on.” She crawls back and puts her hand to the ground, beginning to grow a thick vine in a glow of green. Vahn looks at Rogal, at Ashen, and back to Lila. He knows injury. He’s seen enough of it. He knows that Rogal will die before Lila manages to get her vine long enough to get down there.

  
“Li,” He says, panic in his voice. She hums, looks over her shoulder, still steadily growing the vine, “There’s no time.” Vahn tells her firmly, “He needs you now, or he’ll die.”

  
“I- I know, but I don’t know what to do.” Lila gives up on the vine and turns, tears springing to her eyes, “There’s no room to climb and I can’t fly and I can’t suspend myself-”

  
“Wait,” Vahn interrupts, “That’s- okay. I need you to trust me here, okay? _Rogal_ needs you to trust me, just for a bit.”

Lila looks back over the edge, where Ashen is taking Rogal’s pulse again.

“He’s fading, Li!” He calls up, panicked, and Lila turns back to Vahn with determination in her eyes.

  
“Okay.”

  
Vahn takes a breath and pulls his hands up, turning toward the edge,

“Jump.”

She does.

She doesn’t wait or question, she just turns and leaps in a swan dive over the edge of the ravine, and Vahn throws himself down onto his stomach in a blaze of cobalt blue. It swirls around Lila and tugs at her clothes, slowing her descent until she hovers mid-air beside Ashen and Rogal,

“Go!” he calls, “I can’t keep this up long!”

He’s already shaking and exhausted as Lila sets a hand gently on Rogal’s head and begins to thrum and glow with a heartbeat of green light, siphoning her own energy to close Rogal’s wounds and stabilise him. Ten seconds pass. Thirty.

  
“Li, I need to bring you up!” Vahn calls, his voice warbling,

  
“Not yet!” She yells back in a panic, “Just a little longer!”

  
“I can’t hold you!”

  
“Vahn,” Carver drops to a knee beside him, “Take my hand.”

  
Vahn, trembling, turns to look at him through the haze of pain and blue flooding his vision, light seeping up and off of him like a candle flame. Carver has one pale hand offered out to him, and Vahn doesn’t have the mental ability to question why. He pulls one arm up, shaking with the effort, and clasps Carver’s hand in his own.

Immediately, a wave of black washes over him, and he feels stronger. More invigorated. His magic flares, and he knows that he can hold out-

“I’ve got you!” he calls down, and Lila nods firmly, blue light radiating from her clothes and melding with the blinding green on her hands, making a bright teal in its midst. 

Forty-five seconds.

A minute.

“That’ll do! Go! Go!”

Vahn raises his arm and Lila begins to float out, dragging Rogal behind her. Ashen swirls with wind and makes to move off. At the last moment, something twinges and he stumbles against the wall, reaching out to steady himself-

His hand finds Dolor’s pommel. It holds steady under his weight, but there is a burst of shadow-black behind his vision,

**_“Is he safe?”_** a voice like a rumble of arcane thunder rolling around inside a maelstrom, barely words and yet somehow it could be nothing but. It makes Ashen’s head hurt for a moment as he tries to figure out what the _fuck_ is going on.

“Yes,” He answers almost automatically, and then there is a swirl of shadow-black magic from Ashen’s own free hand. Wind howls around them, below them, and pushes all three of them up and out of the ravine to splay out on the grass at the side.

Carver crumples into a pile on the floor, unconscious and blood trickling from the corner of his mouth from a bitten lip. Vahn doesn’t have the energy left to scramble; as soon as Carver’s hand leaves his, he feels thoroughly wrung out. Instead, he rolls and painstakingly crawls to Carver’s side, still laid out in the grass, he lifts a hand and baps it down onto the side of Carver’s face. There’s so little left within him, but he takes a shaking breath and pushes the last shards of his cobalt blue magic through Carver’s skin to close up the half-moon crescent in his lip. And promptly, Vahn joins Carver and Rogal as part of the _knocked the fuck out_ club.

Lila, from Rogal’s side, frowns over at the other two unconscious members of the party.

“I guess we’re sleeping here tonight.” She comments dubiously, and Ashen gives out a little groan,

  
“I guess so. Do you have tents? I can help set up.”

  
“No tents, no. I might need to borrow you to help keep me up, but- hold on.”  
  
Lila shuffles between her unconscious friends and gathers them in together, then stands roughly in the middle and spreads her arms. She exhales, a dim green glow dancing across her fingers and bursting into little vine-like trails that spread and circle her like ribbons to a maypole. Ashen watches, stunned, as tiny saplings begin to grow from the ground and slowly wind themselves around, up into a dome, growing thicker and woodier as they do. Lila is sweating by the time they hit the halfway point, but doesn’t stop, measuring her breathing as she draws the branches up above her into a dome shape. Twigs twine around one another, forming a thick, leafy umbrella against the sky above.

It takes about fifteen minutes, and by the time it’s done, Lila is wrung-out and shaking. She sits down in a whumph, her chickens clucking as they gather around her in concern. Whilst she’s been working, Ashen has laid out all of their bedrolls on the forest floor, atop an oilskin tarpaulin to keep the damp of the earth off of their blankets. He’s partway through hefting Rogal into his bedroll when Lila drops, and he looks over to her in alarm and concern.

“Are you okay?”

  
“Fuh- fine,” Lila pants, flashing him a smile and petting her worried chickens, “Just tired. I need to sleep.”

  
“I can keep watch for a bit if you want?” Ashen offers, and Lila shakes her head,

  
“Don’t worry! Nobody can get in, and the chickens are trained to keep watch in turns anyway!” And pants at too many words at once. She settles for crawling over and climbing into her bedroll, kicking her boots off as she goes. She peels off her outer layer of dress and shivers her way into the blankets, cocooning herself.

  
“Thank you,” She says quietly into the darkness, the sound of Ashen changing out of his day clothes.

  
“What for?” He answers, and there’s a moment of pause as Lila nestles closer in her blankets,

  
“For- um. You just- jumped in after Rogal. Like, you didn’t think about it? I- thank you.”

Ashen looks over at her, the outline of her under piles of blankets and sighs a little, lets himself smile,

“It’s fine. We’re friends, right? We’re working together?”

  
“Mhm.”

  
“Then I’ll keep trying to help. Goodnight, Li.”

  
“Night, Ash.” She murmurs, drifting off in her warmth already. Ashen chuckles a little, crawling into his own bedroll and closing his eyes. He promises himself that he’ll soon find his brother. This is all for him.


	13. The Olive Branches

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Reconciling themselves from the previous day's almost-tragedy, the group continues onward.

Morning comes with dull sunlight through the cracks in the leafy dome, but for the most part, the party sleeps on. Aoibheann is the first to awaken, groggy but somewhat refreshed. His muscles ache from the magical strain of the night before, though, and it hurts when he sits up. He lets out a little hiss of pain, pushes his blankets back, and shuffles out of bed. He’s careful not to crinkle things as he moves around, pulling his bags to him and sifting through his things. It’s chilly in this little wooden dome, and he figures- well. They can take time, and everyone can stand to be warmer.

He reaches into his endless satchel and wills his forge to him, withdraws a two-inch cube of what appears at first glance to be solid iron, and weighs about the same. He takes hold of it in both hands- one newly-gloved and fingers restored- and twists the halves in opposite directions, breathing his magic into the runic lines laid within the metal. It glows faintly, then the lines brighten, and he sets it down a few feet in front of him and watches as it expands into a small, but perfectly usable forge. All it takes is a quick breath of flame from the Fire Mage, and it becomes a silent little oven of heat.

Vahn is used to the heat, he doesn’t mind sitting directly in front of the flames, and he’s happy for this chance to work on his creations once more, it’s been a couple of weeks at this point. He puts a hand into his endless satchel, and tosses them into the flames, using his magic to manipulate them into place. Various pieces come from his bag and find their way manipulated into the fire, and, when they’ve been fit to his satisfaction, he takes out his nuts and bolts and works on binding them together at just the right places for them to be perfectly adjustable.

He’s sure he has elastic, somewhere. He wills it to him in the satchel and finds nothing, sighs, and begins to methodically sort through his pockets

It’s about two hours in when the next of them wakes. Rogal, groaning and pushing himself up onto his elbows. Vahn turns and smiles over his shoulder, makes a little shushing gesture to Rogal, turns back to the fire to wind his elastic into place on the cooling plates. He’s added chains, now, has greased the little cogs, and nuts, and is working on clasping it all together. Theoretically, it’s much the same as things he’s made before, but it needs some work, and he needs to sharpen the blade edges. Another couple of sessions would definitely work, he thinks.  
He doesn’t notice Rogal creeping up beside him until he’s sat on his knees in the light of the flame.   
  


“What happened?” Rogal asks at the pause in Vahn’s work.  
  


“You fell down a ravine,” Vahn answers in an almost-mechanical voice, clipping the casing of his creation into place, “We think you hit your head, and- uh- almost died. It took all of us to get you out, and it was Dolor that kept you from beefing it in the first place. I don’t know how it broke through your sheath, but if it wasn’t for that sword embedding itself in the rock, you’d be a kebab right now. Without the cooked meat.”  
  


“Oh.” Says Rogal, a little put off. Vahn flashes him a brief smile.  
  


“But we’re all safe, that’s the important thing, right? We’re all still here.”  
  


“Ah, _ja,_ you’re right. Thank you for helping me!”  
  


“I didn’t do much.” Vahn laughs a little, awkwardly, “Li and Ashen did most of it. And Carver helped me lift Li down to you and back out safely…”  
  


“That’s a lot of work, Vahn, don’t sell yourself short.” Rogal pats his shoulder, smiling, “You put in a lot of effort to help, I know how hard it is to hold someone up, especially for a long time. So, thank you.”

Vahn tries to pretend he’s not tearing up a little, swiping the back of his hand across his eyes.

“You’re welcome, Rogal.”

There stretches a few quiet minutes, Peanut comes over and settles at Rogal’s side for pats, away from the direct heat of the fire but still toasty warm.

“Vahn?” Rogal breaks the quiet as Vahn is quelling the flame in the forge. The Hellborn hums and looks over to him for a brief moment before turning back to his work, prompting Rogal to continue, “We’re friends, yes?”

Vahn startles a little, looks over at him again, this time without looking away.  
  


“Uh,” he says awkwardly, “I- I guess? Yeah. We’re friends. I think- I’ve never had friends before.”

There’s a moment of stunned silence as Vahn comprehends that, yes, in fact, he has finally found himself some friends. Unusual.

  
  


By the time the others wake up, it’s coming up on midday. They’ve all had an exhausting night, after all, and once Carver drags himself up, Vahn shifts over toward him and pulls him aside.

“Yesterday,” says Vahn in a low voice, “You- I know what you did, but _what_ did you do?”

  
It’s an awkwardly phrased question, but Carver gets it. He lets out a low sigh, looks away, doesn’t meet Vahn’s eyes.  
  
“It’s- an acquired skill. Mostly Spirit magic, for a bit, I can kind of… merge my soul with yours? So you can draw on my magic. It uses twice the normal amount for me, but- in emergencies, like yesterday…”

  
Vahn looks down at his hands, catches sight of Carver’s own trembling in his peripheral. He breathes in, and out, steadying himself.

  
“I know it was necessary, but I was- I was worried. When you collapsed, you’d bitten your lip, and I- uh. I mean, I healed it! But… be careful?” Vahn asks, hopeful, and Carver looks up to meet his eyes. There’s a slight frown creasing his brow, and he seems genuinely worried about Carver’s wellbeing; this is most unusual. Carver smiles at him, small, but genuine and soft. Vahn swallows whatever threatens to spill from his throat.  
  
He’s not sure if it’s vomit or words.

They’re back on the move within the hour, this time keeping close together and testing the ground ahead of them with various weapons before they step. Rogal is heartbroken to find that his beloved scythe has been smashed in his fall, relents to using Dolor, jabbing his point into the earth and arguing about its necessity in a way that sounds thoroughly one-sided to the other.

  
“I _know_ you think it’s degrading, but it’s helping to keep us safe! The others told me you were worried, you know.”  
  


There’s a pause and a slight grin from Rogal as he jabs again into the underbrush, hearing a reply that the others don’t.  
  


“No, but I was told it was you that saved me first. Right? You stopped me falling?”  
  


More silence. Vahn has tuned out by now, gazing wistfully out into the vibrant greens of the forest and wondering just how long they have yet to travel. He roughly estimates that they’ve walked maybe a grand total of fifteen to twenty miles in the few hours they’d had yesterday. From his estimation, from Wyldhase to the Alabaster Boscage outskirts is, give or take, between two hundred and fifty to three hundred miles. At a twelve-hour decent pace with no breaks, it will take roughly eight and a half days.

  
“Are we just going to… walk? The whole way?”

  
“What other choice do we have?” Carver asks, shrugging a little, “We’re doing our best. Is that okay?”

  
“Yeah, but even if it wasn’t, I wouldn’t have a choice.” Vahn grins, giving a little sort of laugh, “I have to do what Jester asks, right?”

  
“I don’t think he’d hold you to it, if you really don’t want to come with us.” Carver answers, pushing a branch up and out of the way and holding it for Vahn to duck through. The hellborn inclines his head gratefully.

  
“I mean- I don’t know. Even if he was okay with it, I’d feel bad leaving him hanging.” Vahn shakes his head, sweeping a hand out ahead of him with a trail of cobalt blue, pushing the patch of brambles ahead of them to split in halves and create a path. Lila calls back a thanks, and they follow through the gap before he drops his magic away. Carver is the last through; the brambles catch on the back of his cloak as he steps out of the closing patch. Vahn waits a few feet ahead until Carver catches up, and they begin moving again.

Most of the journey is… quiet. There’s little conversation between anyone but Lila, Rogal, and the otherwise-silent Dolor. Ashen, Vahn, and Carver aren’t the most social of creatures.

They travel an hour or so into the night, pushing harder than they really should, so by the time they stop, they’re kind of exhausted and ready to sleep. Still, in the fifteen or so minutes that Lila takes to set their little dome up, the others start shuffling around getting ready.

“I’ll hunt something down for food. Vahn, Carver, I hear water- see if you can find it, and keep an eye out for fruits and edible things for Lila. Rogal, are you alright just starting the fire? I don’t want to stress you.”

  
“I’m fine!” Rogal insists with a grin, “But I can do the fire and keep Li company, that’s no problem.”

  
Ashen gives a grateful nod, turns to Vahn and Carver for their acceptance. Vahn is already gearing up with the larger waterskin from his endless satchel, and Carver just nods at Ashen in reply. The group splits in opposite directions; Vahn and Carver take off across the ground, and Ashen takes to the treetops.  
  


He finds this somewhat freeing, dancing through the branches easily, finding only twigs scratching his face as his biggest worries. He stops, periodically, listening out for any sort of prey. He sees a few birds, barely five minutes in, but none of them are large enough to warrant him shooting. He knows that he can do better.

Ten minutes in, he finds exactly what he was looking for. There are two rabbits snuffling around a section of shrub-like trees, but they’re not his target- the fruits they’re after are. Still, he takes his bow and pins one quickly, easily, an instant death. The other skitters away, terrified, and he feels a pang of guilt for it, but shifts down the tree anyway. He takes the rabbit, murmurs a thanks to any Gods listening for the hunt, for the protection of the creature’s soul into a new life. And he begins to collect the fruit- sloes- in a little solid container that he trusts won’t collapse and crush them.  
The rabbit isn’t the ideal catch for all of them, though, so he continues on. He really doesn’t want to find anything too big, like a deer, because he doesn’t want to lug the meat around with them.

By the time Ashen returns, he’s resigned himself to rabbit for dinner. He has two in his carrier satchel when he steps into camp, tub of sloes in one hand, and a cotton scarf wrapped around a collection of what he thinks to be edible mushrooms in the other. He plans on getting Lila to make sure, of course, he’s not irresponsible.

Rogal has a fire going, is hammering the spit poles in when Ashen rejoins them. Lila has grown the majority of the dome, now, and is moving around the outside padding it out with moss. The inside already has a section that has the tarpaulin pinned in, and bedrolls set up somewhat haphazardly.

It’s oddly homely inside the little dome; it smells like fresh earth and flowers, and it’s reasonably warm. The moss that Lila is growing to coat the outside is very good at insulating the heat from the fire.

Ashen kneels beside Rogal and sets his prey bag down,   
  


“Two rabbits,” he says, “But I don’t think cleaning them in front of Li is the best idea.”  
  


“No, probably not.” Rogal agrees, “I can take the first one outside? And you can do the next one?”

  
“Alright,” Ashen gives a brief smile, and Rogal takes one of the two rabbits from the bag, takes the offered skinning knife from Ashen, and heads on out to clean it out of sight of Lila.

Ashen goes instead to tend to his bedroll, noting that Vahn and Carver aren’t back yet. He decides to deal with their bedrolls, too, neatening them up and noting that Rogal has bridged the gap between their two groups, setting Vahn and Carver next to one another. It checks out, Ashen reasons- he’s not a fool, and Vahn is hardly subtle with the way he blushes every time Carver smiles at him. Ashen knows a crush when he sees one.


	14. Forage for Friends

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vahn and Carver go looking for vegetarian options...

Out in the forest, Vahn kneels at the damp riverbank and dips his hands into the bubbling stream, exhaling his worry as the cool water washes over his leather gloves. Carver watches from a few feet back, amused, satchel of the last crisp apples of autumn held at his side.  
  


“Are you not going to take the gloves off?”  
  


Vahn looks over to him sheepishly, as though he’d forgotten he was there. He pulls his hands from the water and shakes them somewhat dry,  
  


“I- uh. I don’t like looking at…” He waves his right hand, avoiding Carver’s eyes. Carver hums sympathetically, but Vahn can tell he’s distracted by something, so he turns to follow his gaze.  
Blotting out most of the moonlight, stretched wide above them, is an old tree with fan-like leaves and heavy-looking spiked fruits. Vahn’s face lights up,

“Is that a chestnut tree?”

  
“I think it is.” Carver answers, smile evident in his voice, “And it’s the right time of year for it.”

  
“ _Excellent,_ ” Vahn says, and springs up the nearby embankment, scrambles across the thin stream- almost a mini waterfall- and begins his climb up the tree. Carver chuckles, keeps an ear out in case Vahn should fall, and crouches at the side of the river to begin filling the waterskins. For a few minutes, there is only the soft shuffling and grunting of Vahn climbing the tree to contrast the peaceful forest, soft breeze and quiet insects clicking their way awake for the night. Carver spots a small group of shimmering silver minnow slipping past him in the water, the moonlight glinting off of their scales as they dart downstream. Following their path a few metres, he spots a sprouting of tall, curved, almost grassy leaves in the mud of the embankment. Something within him vaguely tickles with a memory, and he wades through the water- startling a crayfish that he hadn’t noticed hiding under a rock- and he makes his way over.

He takes a fistful of the leaves and pulls up- yes! He’d thought he’d recognised them, wild onion leaves, and there looks to be a good few around here. He smiles, bends to begin cleaning the dirt from the bulbs when he hears a triumphant cheer from Vahn,  
  


“Got some!”  
  


“Excellent!” Carver calls back, “I found some onions!”

  
This is met with another, wordless cheer, and the sound of scuffling as Vahn turns around to make his way back down. Carver packs a good five or six of the onions into his bag before turning and wading back upstream, glad of his waterproof boots that the river is about two inches too shallow to flood.   
  
As he’s climbing back up onto the earth, there’s a small yelp from vaguely above him, harsh rustling, and then Vahn begins to plummet from the tree.

He’s trailing cobalt to slow himself, but it seems to have been such a surprise he can’t quite grip his own magic right. Carver doesn’t remember jumping out to try and catch him, but he definitely feels the bruising as Vahn lands in his arms and they both go crashing to the floor with a loud _oof_ that could have been far worse if it wasn’t for Vahn’s magic.   
Still, he’s worried as he gently shoves Vahn aside and pulls himself up. It’s not been long since the firework incident, and he’s sure Vahn’s beaten, bruised body can’t have healed just yet.

Thankfully, though, Vahn is mostly just winded, trying hard to catch his breath as he pushes up onto one elbow, still clutching a bag full of sweet chestnuts.  
  


“Oof,” Vahn manages, emphatically.

  
Carver groans in agreement, one hand on Vahn’s shoulder,

  
“Are you okay?”

  
“Are you? I’m not light.” Vahn sits, wincing at the pain in his chest and back. Carver gives him an awkward, somewhat-pained smile, and pats his shoulder before standing up.

  
“I’ll live. You got some, then?”

  
“A good few, yeah,” Vahn grins, taking the hand Carver offers him to get up and shaking the bag with the other hand, “We might even be able to make a stew. I have salt in my alchemy supplies.”

  
“Is it edible?” Carver asks as they turn to return to camp, and Vahn laughs. It’s a bright sound in the dark forest, echoing from tree trunks and being caught in the tangles and snarls of brambles and underbrush.

  
“I’ve eaten it. It’s probably not the most perfect, but it won’t kill us or poison us, at least.”

  
“Good enough.” Carver shrugs, pushes aside a tree branch for Vahn when a patch of leaves catches his attention from a few feet away. He pauses, and Vahn follows his eyes in the moment of stillness, face lighting up when he spots the leaves,  
  


“Is that- do you think?”

  
“Looks like it,” Carver smiles, and the two of them pick their way across patches of nettles to dig up the earth, turning up ovular, dirt-covered tubers. Potatoes. They were right.

  
“Oh, _now_ it’s a stew.” Vahn beams, and Carver gives a quiet breath of laughter as the two of them begin to collect and make their way back toward camp.

By the time the group is all within the dome again, both rabbits have been cleaned, and one of them is turning on the spit. Ashen is very focused on the slow process, but looks up when Carver and Vahn come in, both smiling and smeared with mud.

“You look pleased.” Ashen comments lightly, and Vahn grins at him, waving his little bag of chestnuts,

  
“We are. We got a fair bit, actually. Enough for a good stew for Li, if you want it?”  
  
The last bit of this sentence is directed at Lila herself, sat cross-legged against the wall of the dome, out of the path of the smoke. Her face is a little crinkled from the smell of cooking meat, but she’s snacking on little blue-black berries and seems content enough. There’s a trickle of deep, wine-red juice down her chin that she swipes away with the back of her hand as she wriggles up,

  
“Oh! That’d be great, actually!” She smiles at him, “I think I have a pot in my pack…”

  
“I’ve got one.” Vahn assures, heading toward his satchel and gesturing to the tub of berries as he moves, “What’d you get?”

  
“Sloes,” Ashen is the one to answer, face wrinkling with disdain, “I still don’t know how you can eat them raw.”

  
“They taste good!” Lila protests, popping another in her mouth for emphasis, “Not everything has to be sweet!”

  
“They’re worse than lemons.” Ashen counters, and Rogal laughs from the other side of the dome, heads over to where Lila is sat,

  
“Can I try one?”  
  


Lila hands a sloe over, and Rogal goes at it with gusto, taking half of it out in a clean bite and wrinkling his face as the tart flavour hits his tongue. There are unwilling tears in his eyes by the time he finishes the whole berry, and he coughs once it’s gone, but he’s smiling.

  
“They’re, ah… an acquired taste, I think?”

  
“You don’t like them?” Lila looks at him, wide-eyed, and Rogal feels a pang of guilt,  
  


“They’re not my sort of food, but that’s okay! You get more of them, that way.”

  
This seems to satisfy Lila, and she settles back to her snack as Ashen lifts the current rabbit on the spit to inspect it. The outside is charred and browned, so hopefully, the inside should be cooked too. He takes the second spit from his pack, calls Rogal over, and switches places with him. Rogal loads the second rabbit onto the spit, and Ashen gets to preparing the cooked one whilst Vahn takes his pot, the ingredients, and Carver, and plops himself down beside Lila.

  
“We found some potatoes and onions,” he gestures, “And some chestnuts. Also, apples, but I don’t think they’d be great in a stew.”

  
“Mmm, no,” Lila agrees, leaning closer to the pot, “Ashen found some morel mushrooms, that would go well! They have a sort of nutty flavour.”

  
“Mushrooms go rubbery when boiled don’t they?” Carver asks as he sets the waterskins out with the other ingredients,  
  


“They do. We could roast them too, I suppose.”

  
“I’d go for a roasted mushroom!” Rogal calls from the spit, makes Lila chuckle. Together, she, Vahn, and Carver begin to cut and peel their ingredients and add them to the pot. They’re careful not to overfill, and when it comes time to pour the water in, they find the pot is only about half full, with plenty of ingredients left over.

  
“We should be able to save those for tomorrow,” Lila beams, gestures at the various items, “Less work for us!”

  
“And you should be able to grow some of these now, too, right?” Vahn asks.

There’s a moment of quiet in the dome as Ashen looks up from his work, Rogal’s mouth drops open, Carver facepalms, and Lila’s eyes widen.

“I can grow things.” She says, slowly. Vahn shifts nervously.

  
“Yeah?”

  
“ _I forgot I can just grow things._ ”

  
  
This is followed by a wave of laughter from the group, and they ease into the night. Soon, the rabbits have been cooked and eaten by the boys, and Lila’s stew is adequately salted and scarfed down.  
She ends their evening by growing a small thicket of mossy brambles in their little doorway, settling her chickens around the dying fire, and crawling into her bedroll between Carver and Rogal.

  
“Thank you guys, for looking for food for me.” She murmurs, sleepily, to vague hums and a single decree that it was no issue from Vahn.   
Then, the group hunkers down in the pleasantly warm dome, listening to rain patter on the roof above them, and they fall away to sleep.


	15. Meanwhile, Still,

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I wonder how Rosie is doing?

“It’s nowhere near charged enough.” Ophelia Loz’znt grimaces as an exhausted, trembling Rosie makes her plea in front of her.  
  


“I’ll be fast,” Rosie promises, “All I need is sixteen minutes on it.”  
  


“You’ll be fast,” Ophelia sighs, “But he won’t be. He has seven years to catch up on in the span of a few moments. He’ll barely be able to move. You’d need at least forty-five, and even then, I’d call it a close shave.”

They look at where the cloak of gears is spread out on the ground in a little halo of amber-tinted sunlight. Four of the gears have re-solidified, a fifth is just beginning to bronze into place. It takes so long, _so long_. Six hours, for one measly minute of protection. And longer, as it gains more charge, until a whole day is needed for a single minute.

“How long do I have to wait? For forty-five?”

Ophelia sighs again and clicks as she does some quick maths in her head, then shakes it as she returns her sights to Rosie,

“Just under two months,” she says, already expecting Rosie’s outburst. And it comes.

  
“ _Two months?_ ” she fumes, “ _Two months!?_ How- I can’t wait that long. I need to get him out.”  
  


“You _need_ to be safe.” Ophelia sighs, and plops to sit on the floor, putting her roughly eye-level with a furious Rosie, “You’re the only one that can handle the temporal sheath. If we lose you, we could lose everything. We still need to figure out _how_ to fix it.”

Rosie opens her mouth like she’s going to argue, but snaps it closed again at the sadness behind the rainbow of Ophelia’s eyes.

“I know.” Says Ophelia, and her voice is softer now, “I know you want to save him. I want to help you do that. But- you’re not the only one with someone in there.”

There passes a few long moments of silence, and Rosie sits too, letting out a shaking breath.

“I know.” She says quietly, “And we couldn’t get to Colein even if we tried, not whilst they’re stuck in that temporal bubble.”

  
“Exactly.” Ophelia agrees with a nod, “I miss my brother just as you miss Ian. But we _will_ get them back, as soon as we figure out what started this, and how to fix it. We won’t give up on them. Okay?”

  
Rosie lifts her eyes to meet Ophelia’s and sees the truth there, in the determined line of her mouth and the deliberate calm way she holds her shoulders. Rosie nods.

  
“Okay.”

  
“Thank you, Rosie.” Ophelia smiles at her, and casts a quick gaze out over the town of Jousimies, where the rest of her little band of rebels is staying. She blinks down at the town, bathed in sunlight and going about their lives happily, as though nothing is wrong. The blessed ignorance of average mortals is not knowing the peril the chosen must go through to _keep_ them blessedly ignorant.

“Keep an eye on Alistair, won’t you?” Ophelia says, sounding distracted, “I sense he has an ulterior motive for working with you. I don’t know if he quite understands it, but there is a seed of maliciousness within him that I fear he won’t be able to shake.”

Lightning dances over Ophelia’s usually-bright eyes, a whirlwind of storm clouds and blood splatter, the glint of lightning on an unusually dark blade. Rosie knows from experience and being here enough that this is a vision, Ophelia is Seeing the future as it may come around. That drives an indescribably anxiety up Rosie’s spine, feeling for all matters as though she’s been electrified. She shivers, follows Ophelia’s gaze.

  
“I’ll keep an eye out.” She promises, “I’ll try to keep him safe.”

  
“Good. Thank you, Rosie. I’ll let you know when the cloak reaches its minimum for the journey, I promise.”

  
Rosie stands, brushes the mountain dirt off of her clothes, and nods.

  
“Okay. Thanks, Ophelia. I- I’m sorry.”

  
Ophelia turns to her and smiles, the same sun-bright smile that Rosie had first met her with.

  
“Whatever for?” She asks, genuine, “You’ve done nothing wrong, Rosie. Good luck.”

Rosie inclines her head awkwardly, and then scampers away, back down the mountainside toward the town. Behind her, Ophelia deflates and turns, already drawing her glowing greatsword from its extradimensional sheath,

“I know you’re there, Alistair,” She calls in a voice like summer thunder, “And you won’t take it.”

Alistair peeks out from behind a rock, clutching his weapon tightly and trying his damndest to stay out of sight.

 ** _‘It’s important,’_** Veritas whispers in the back of his mind, **_‘We can’t let her get away with keeping secrets.’_**

“We can’t let her get away,” Alistair murmurs, eyes on the cloak,

**_‘If we have to kill her to reveal the truth, we will.’_ **

“We will.” Alistair echoes. A rush of pride comes through him from his link with Veritas, and he exhales softly.

**_‘It can wait, for now. We needn’t endanger ourselves with impatience. Two months, she said.’_ **

“We’ll come back, then.” Alistair agrees, slipping away from his hiding place and back into the dark cracks of the rock, away just in time to avoid the thrust of flaming greatsword that comes through the thin shatter line he’d been hiding behind. Ophelia curses and turns back to the cloak, her eyes peeled for Alistair, knowing now it will be at least a week before he tries again.


	16. Growing Closer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vahn finishes his forge project...

Morning arrives in the forest, damp and cool, though far better inside the dome than out. The group rouses at roughly similar times from the skittering of animals outside, unable to drift away again in the chilly morning air.

Vahn starts the fire going with the extra firewood that Rogal reveals from the night before, and they get to work roasting the mushrooms and chestnuts for an easy breakfast whilst the others pack up their belongings. By nine-thirty, they’re all fed and ready to go.

“At this pace, we should make it in just under a week,” Vahn says, studying the trees they pass. Rogal has taken to the front again, but is still being just as vigilant with his sword.  
  


“That’s a lot of walking.” Carver comments lightly, not even looking as he reaches out and snags Vahn’s jacket to pull him aside right before he steps right into a hornet’s nest. He avoids it by inches, and trudges on.

They’ve reached something of a habit now. Ashen is the first to notice it, the quick way that Carver and Vahn guard one another from the various dangers of the forest. Vahn uses his powers to flatten nettles, Carver pushes aside a thorned branch for Vahn to duck under, and they go around in circles of politeness.

_Politeness._

If that was all it was, it wouldn’t be so concerning.

If it wasn’t for Vahn sitting just a little too close to Carver when they stop for food. If it wasn’t for them tagging along together on each individual excursion that they take setting up for the night.

He wakes up to them talking by the dying embers of the fire one night, or early morning. They’re huddled together, shoulder to shoulder, heads ducked in close. Ashen doesn’t really hear what they’re talking about, besides a sense of loneliness. He’s tired and sleep-sodden, barely registers they’re there at all.   
The following morning, when he turns and calls Vahn’s name, he catches them holding one another’s hand for a brief moment before they jerk apart.

The first glimpses of ever-autumn trees and paper-white trunks is a blessing, coming near midnight of the seventh day of travel. They’re all tired, their feet hurt, but they plod their way into the very outskirts of the Alabaster Boscage before they settle down for the night.  
Lila is practically vibrating with excitement as they cook up an unusually floral-smelling stew that night. It’s Lila’s home, and none of them are willing to hunt here- instead, they follow her around as she forages up a handful of her native plants- mostly leeks, some sort of reddish potato, and another root vegetable, deep purple, shaped vaguely like a lumpy sort of potato. Armed with these and a few roots of ginger, she makes them all a stew of deliciously fresh flavours.

“This is an oricot,” She beams at them, gesturing to the lumpy purple thing that comprises most of the red-purple stew, “It only grows here. It’s kind of distantly related to potatoes, but is sort of its own thing? It’s classified as a tuber, though.”

She stabs a bit of oricot from her stew with her metal spike and lifts it up to display its pink-purple flesh,

  
“It’s also really pretty and makes a good dye if you peel and boil the skins.”

The rest of the night passes with Lila telling little stories about the boscage, about her family, about her chickens. She tells them of the Glimmer Realm and how beautiful it is, the odd colour schemes there and the weird way time feels to pass. 

  
“I suppose we should, really,” she says, full-cheeked, between mouthfuls, “Go and check with- mm- Ophelia. She’s probably the best to ask about the keys.”

  
There’s general murmurs of agreement, though Carver stays silent and stares into his soup as though doing so will help him melt into it. Vahn leans into him,

  
“Are you okay?” he asks under his breath. Carver’s eyes dart to him, then back. He nods, once, pulls a spoon of stew into his mouth to attempt to emphasise his point though Vahn squints at him, disbelieving. He doesn’t press, though, he knows better than to do that. Instead, he scoots a little closer and slips his arm into a loop through Carver’s, squeezing gently before going back to his stew.

When they lay down to bed that night, Vahn turns over in his bedroll to find Carver’s eyes already on him. He smiles for the human, but doesn’t get one back.  
He knows well that he can’t risk asking him, talking to him out loud. So, instead, he slips one arm out from under his blankets and offers it out to Carver.   
Carver does the same, laces his fingers with Vahn’s, and the two of them sigh as they settle down to sleep like that.

  
  
  


Morning comes, as it always does, with a light mist that creeps into their dome and wakes Vahn before all others. It must be barely past dawn, he thinks by the dim light, so he gets up quietly and sets up his portable forge on the other side of the dome.   
The air fills with the soft, slick sound of Vahn whetting the near-complete weapon he’s been working on slowly. He’s managed to set it up almost exactly as he wants it, with internal clips triggered by gears that will set the metal plates against one another for the expanded form, and curl them in when it’s contracted. By the time the others wake up, he’s finishing up the rapier form and finishing the addition of the internal switch. He looks it over, studies it as the rest of his friends get to making breakfast, and decides that he could work on it more if given the chance.   
He has plans for engraving runes and grooves across it, then filling those with celetrum- a specific, special metal alloy that can transfer magic power, as in crystals, given a source of that power. He’s used it a few times- like in his gun- but he’s running low right now, and will need to stock up. The stuff isn’t cheap, but it enhances a weapon.

Rogal brings him a bowl of breakfast, mostly the same sort of stew from the night before with less water and more vegetables, and Vahn thanks him when he takes it. 

  
“Hey,” he says, as Rogal turns to return, “I have somethin’ for you.”

  
Rogal turns back, curious, and sits in front of him, “You didn’t have to!” He says, automatically. Vahn smiles at him and holds out the basically-finished weapon to him, handle first. Rogal’s eyes widen in surprise as he takes it, holding it gingerly, as though it might break. It looks as though it’s made in segments of shiny white-gold metal, sharpened at the edges to a razor point. The current form it’s in looks something like a rapier with a slightly wider blade, not quite enough to be called a longsword, but just marginally too broad to be a true rapier. It’s double-edged, so doesn’t fit the definition of a sabre or other backsword, and it’s too slender to be a broadsword.

  
“I still need to do some work on it when I get a hold of some more celetrum,” Vahn explains, gesturing to the blade, “But it’s functional. You have some telekinesis, yeah?”

  
“A very little bit,” Rogal says, reaching a hand toward a nearby fallen leaf and concentrating his red rime of magic around its edges to pick it up and drop it again in example. Vahn smiles,

  
“Good! So on the inside of the pommel here,” he taps the little rounded knob at the end of the handle, “There’s a crank-switch. Hold on-” he leans over and gently pries open the clasp to display aforementioned switch, “So when this is closed, all you have to do is telekinetically lift this,” he does as he says, pulling the little switch out the half a centimetre it takes to remove the catch from its indentation, “Then crank it. Clockwise to extend, anticlockwise to compact. Once it’s gone as far as it can, set it back in the indent.”

He doesn’t crank it, but he does press the switch back in when he’s done, and closes the pommel back up before Rogal can use his hands to fiddle.

  
“Now?” Asks Rogal, partway between excitement and dubiousness. Vahn nods enthusiastically,

  
“Give yourself a couple of feet in front of you, though.” And presses himself up against the wall, out of the way, as Rogal frowns a little at the blade and his eyes begin to glow a faint red. Then a little stronger, and there’s a soft clicking and creaking from the weapon as the gears inside begin to turn, and the blade begins to extend. The tip curves over, flattens out to a few inches wide, the handle extends to a few feet in length, and about twenty seconds later the crank clicks back into its indent. The weapon is fully extended from a sword to a scythe, and it’s caught everyone’s attention.

“Whoa,” Says Rogal, wide-eyed, “You made this?”

  
“Your other one broke and got lost, right? I know Dolor can be a pain to use.”

  
“He’s not that bad.” Rogal answers, already studying the little plates and bolts of his new scythe, running his thumb along the blade and hissing briefly when it cuts. He shoves his bleeding thumb into his mouth and continues without touching. At least he learns.

  
“That’s really cool, Vahn!” Lila chips in from beside the fire that Ashen is meticulously stoking, and Vahn shoots her a quick grin,

  
“Thanks! I have plans for you guys, too, but I’ll have to get some more supplies in Treawe. Or, wherever we go after this.”

  
Lila startles so hard she jumps to her feet and rushes to pack her things,

  
“Oh! We need to get moving! If we move fast enough we’ll get there before dark.”  
  
  
Vahn counts on his fingers,

  
“That’s about eight hours. Are you sure?”

  
“We’ll have to move a _little_ faster and skip lunch-” to a groan, “- But yes! And my moms will have plenty of food for us.”

  
“Alright.” Vahn sighs, and extinguishes his forge to cool whilst he packs up, “Let’s get going, then.”

Lila flashes him a grin, and they begin to move toward home.


	17. Let Him Come

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rosie and Ophelia stand in the rain on the mountaintop...

A chill wind blows at the mountaintop. The amber glass lens lies shattered on the rock, and Ophelia Loz’nt stands over the fragments left behind with her sword blazing in her hand. Behind her, Rosie has the temporal sheath gathered in her arms and is staring, horrified, as Alistair wipes a trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth. In his hand, a dark, shadow-black whip glints with gold where the blotted sunlight catches its mean-looking spikes. It coils where it hits the floor beside him.

“You can’t take it.” Ophelia warns, “I don’t know what you want with it, but you can’t take it. Whatever it is, you can’t do it alone.”  
  


“I need to get to the Lunar Realm.” Alistair’s eyes glint, showing just how far he’s fallen in the pure black within, “I need to find the Moon-Soul.”  
  


“You won’t find the Moon-Soul there,” Ophelia grimaces, “And you can’t get to the Lunar Realm without Colein. You can’t do whatever this is by yourself, Alistair, and you really can’t afford to burn any more bridges.”  
  


“If the bridges I burn belong to liars, let them _rot,_ ” Alistair snarls. There’s a pleased hum in his mind,

**_“Good, Alistair. This is all you need to do. Help me, and I’ll help you find Benjamin. I’ll help you free his soul.”_ **

“I have to,” Alistair’s voice cracks over the words, “I don’t have the choice. I have to do this. I have to save him.”

  
“Ian?” Rosie asks, peeking out from behind Ophelia, and Alistair turns his black eyes to her with such fury and rage that she feels it like a psychic wave,

  
“ _Benjamin,_ ” Alistair hurls the name like a knife, “I don’t care about Ian. He’s a liar, and you are too- and so is she!” he gestures to Ophelia, raging, pulling his spine straight, “She tells you all she wants to do is help! But all _she_ wants from you is to save her _brother!_ Did she tell you that?”

Rosie looks up at Ophelia, who cannot take her eyes from Alistair, but wishes she could. Rosie looks back over to Alistair, puzzled,

“Yes? I know that. How do _you_ know that?”

There’s a pause, a near-audible screech as Alistair’s mind grinds to a halt and has to kick in once again. A pause and reset.

“Rosie,” Ophelia murmurs in the silence, “Run. Get to safety.”  
  


“No!” Rosie whisper-shouts back, “I’m not leaving you!”  
  


“You have fourteen minutes on the sheath. That’s enough to get him out, right?”  
  


“No, you said forty-five-”  
  


“I know what I said.”  
  
  


Alistair’s grip tightens on his whip and he cracks it backward. In the arch of the tip, there is a burst of white-gold flame that burns along its length, somehow managing to look dark even outshining the sun.

“Rosie, give me the cloak.” Alistair says, a dark, rumbling bite behind his voice that doesn’t belong to him.

  
“No.” Rosie says firmly, taking a step back. Alistair is shaking, finely, and his shadowed out eyes shift from her to Ophelia, stood protectively ahead of her.  
  


“Rosie,” it is a warning, “Do as I say, or I’ll have to take it.”  
  


“You won’t touch her.” Ophelia threatens, taking her stance. She has given up on not having to fight. Alistair lets out a sigh that rattles into a laugh, a maniacal laugh that echoes through the peaks and stretches across the grey, darkening skies.

  
“As you wish.” He bows, and then his flaming whip is lashing out toward Ophelia. She deflects it with her sword, finds the tip wound around her blade and Alistair grinning as he yanks back. Ophelia keeps her grip on the hilt tight and follows the force, winding the whip around the blade as she darts toward him.   
She tries to make a stab into him, tries to use the force to pull the whip from his grip, but her blade meets air as Alistair spins right around the stab, slipping the coil from the blade as he does so.

Rosie watches them as these two blazing forces of dark and light shift around the battlefield, the whip lashing out toward an enemy too close, the blade swinging toward an enemy too fast. Ophelia barely nicks Alistair’s clothes, just as the only thing that comes close to her is the licking radiant flames of the whip. She drops to the floor to roll under the loop that Alistair thinks he has so skillfully made, and he growls as it closes in on nothing.

“This is doing nothing, Veritas!” He spits into the flickering air, still lashing as he speaks, “She’s too fast for distance. I need to get closer.”

**_“As you wish._ ** **”** Veritas replies, and when Alistair pulls the whip back, it solidifies into a single long, thin blade. Veritas has shrunk from its original length to stiffen itself, but it is still taller than Rosie is.

The fight now truly intensifies. Blade meets flaming blade, balls of fire are rocketed skyward, bursting into the cloud layer that is sinking across them. Thunder is beginning to rumble across the storm clouds, and Rosie is still stood watching, horrified, pulling on the cloak and otherwise frozen in unknowing.  
  


And then Alistair finds his foothold. 

He slips around Ophelia’s blade and kicks her legs out from under her as she does, watching her slip on the newly rain-slickened stone, hearing the sizzle as it evaporates on touching their swords.

“I told you just to give it to me.” He says, kicking her sword away and planting a foot on her chest as she tries to right herself, positions his sword above her heart,“You should have listened.”

And he plunges Veritas down.

“ _No!_ ” Rosie screeches, swinging her arms out. There is a flash in her vision, and when she opens her eyes, there is stillness. Grey, everything is grey and still, raindrops suspended mid-air, Ophelia’s eyes on her, the sword barely a centimetre into her skin. Alistair’s face is turned to marble in this moment, and in his eyes there is evil and twisted darkness, stretching to the horrifying grimace on his face.

Rosie doesn’t know how she did it. But she’s stopped time.

She wastes no non-time freaking out about it, rushes over to Alistair and knocks the sword up just enough to pull Ophelia out.

Then she takes Ophelia’s sword from the floor. She has used almost an entire gear.

She pauses only to take a breath, then stabs the greatsword upward and through Alistair’s chest.

The world flashes again around her, the sound of thunder and flame and the echo of her scream fizzled out into the rain as it grows stronger. Alistair’s sword hits the ground in a clatter of final momentum and he looks down to find the terrified face of a goblin staring up at him, her shaking hands clasped firmly around the hilt of a greatsword taller than she is. The flames that wreathe it burn inside him.

He opens his mouth and chokes on blood, on fire, on not enough oxygen as it destroys his lungs and his heart, and everything goes black.

Rosie pulls the sword out. Alistair’s body burns peacefully despite the rain.

“Ophelia!” She turns, dropping the greatsword with a resounding metallic bang as she rushes to Ophelia’s side, where the Sentinel is pushing herself up on one elbow, her free hand going to the centimetre-square wound over her heart.

  
“Are you okay?” is the first thing that Ophelia asks, wincing in pain at her bruised back and arms and everything. Rosie laughs, a little manic, as she crouches in the untouchable cloak at Ophelia’s side.

  
“Are you?”

  
“Mhm.” Ophelia smiles, accepts Rosie’s help to climb back to her feet. She and Rosie walk to the remaining ashes of Alistair’s body, glowing red and hissing in the rainfall. She picks up her greatsword, and then Veritas, and studies both.  
“Here,” She offers the greatsword out to Rosie, “You should take this.”

  
“Your sword?” Rosie asks, eyes wide. Ophelia shakes her head.

  
“ _Your_ sword.” She replies firmly, “You did an act of good with it, despite the toll it took. It’s yours now. Besides,” she gestures to Veritas with a grimace, “I’ll have to guard this one.”

**_“Bitch.”_** Veritas hisses. Ophelia grins at the insult.

“Make sure it can’t get free ever again.” She says to Rosie, softly, setting her free hand on the goblin’s shoulder. She notices Rosie’s eyes are stuck on the shards of amber glass scattered across the plateau.  
  


“What do we do now?” She says quietly, “How do we recharge the cloak without the Solis Speculum? It’s broken…” she ducks and picks up a shard of the glass, and Ophelia watches her heart break as she realises.

  
“Hey, it’s going to be okay. It puts a delay on things, but I have a… friend, I think. Who can fix it, if we get the shards to her.”

  
“A friend?” Rosie looks up, hopeful, and in that moment a bolt of lightning streaks down to strike the rended metal ring behind her where the Solis Speculum once sat. In the brief moment of dazzling white, Rosie’s silhouette reminds Ophelia not of the goblin girl that had once climbed this mountain begging for her help, but of an old prophecy foretold years ago by her own brother. That the cloaked shadowed ones would be the one to rend apart time and seal the fate of the world. 

  
At the time, Ophelia had assumed that they were villains that she would be facing, one day. Now, she suspects, it is quite the opposite. She begins to collect shards,

  
“Yes, a friend. They own the Forge of the Ancients, in Constells, and they have centuries of experience as a blacksmith. They may be the only person alive that can fix this.” She pauses as she straightens up, holding a shard of amber glass in her hand and trying not to squeeze it as her hands shake in rage at herself.  
“I’m sorry,” Ophelia says to Rosie without looking at her, “I didn’t stop him. I couldn’t stop him.”

  
“It’s not your fault.” Rosie replies automatically, despite the fact that part of her blames Ophelia for all of this. Ophelia shakes her head grimly.

  
“I should have Seen him coming, but I didn’t. And now you have to wait longer to save Ian. To save Colein.”  
  


“It’s already been seven years.” Rosie comes up beside Ophelia, reaches out and puts her hand gently over Ophelia’s bloodied one where she clutches the glass too hard, the rain making the blood run and drip down her wrist. “What’s a little more time?”

  
“Hopefully not a death sentence.” Ophelia replies grimly, shaking herself out of her self-loathing and going viciously back to collecting the amber, “I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to deliver this to Armenn for me. You know I cannot leave.”  
  


“Even when there’s nothing here to protect?” Rosie asks, somewhat surprised. Ophelia gives a bitter smile.  
  


“Even then, yes. I can never leave here. I can never die. It’s no sort of life, Rosie.”  
She sighs, picks up a particularly large fragment,  
“I miss my brother.”

  
“It’ll be okay. We’ll figure out a solution one day.” Rosie soothes as she joins Ophelia in her glass collecting, and the Sentinel chuckles, halfway between pitious and bitter.

“By the Gods good graces, I hope we do.”


	18. Arrival at Gleamsheath

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lila's group finally arrives in her hometown...

“We’re almost there!” Lila is running ahead of them now, sprinting at full speed, sure-footed and followed by a band of clucking chickens and puffing friends as they try and fail to match her swift pace across thick forest underbrush. She’s springing from trunk to trunk like a monkey, or some kind of flying squirrel, so safe in her knowledge of this forest that she doesn’t consider even for a moment that she might fall. 

The others have long past given up trying to get her to slow down, and why should she? It’s nearing a month since she last saw her mothers, and she misses them terribly. This is a safe place for her. She deserves to feel safe.

“There!” Lila shouts back, and her grin splits her face from ear-to-ear, tears glimmering in the corners of her eyes, “There it is! That’s my house! That’s _home-_ ”

The others didn’t know that she could move faster, but she becomes a veritable blur in the last hundred or so metres toward the treehouse village, climbing the stairs that spiral around the trunks three at a time, chickens in tow. People milling about the bridges above stop and stare as she rushes past, and as the rest of her party begins to catch up, they hear the shouting begin.

“Princess?”   
  
“Lila?”

“THE PRINCESS HAS RETURNED!”

The shouts are echoed throughout the rooftops, and more people that the party ever thought possible begin to pour out of the treetop houses. Young children, humans, elves, homuna, elderly men and women and folk with wizened, excited smiles come crawling from the woodwork and flood toward what the others assume is Lila’s home. A palace of pale sandstone and marble, built into the fork of a tree so ancient that its trunk is as wide as a river. Into the trunk itself, they see there are windows built, as a fairy tree might be. They catch glimpses of colour as people run up the stairs within to come meet Lila as she arrives home.

  
Rogal is leading the party as they climb the stairs, met halfway by Peanut, who clucks and jumps up to settle on Rogal’s shoulder.

“Oh!” he exclaims in surprise as Peanut ruffles his feathers to get comfortable, “Hello, Peanut. Royal badge of honour?”

  
“Get moving, Rogal,” Ashen pants, clutching a stitch in his side, “If I stop, I won’t start again.”

  
“Sorry.” Rogal shifts ahead again, and they join the back of the crowd pouring onto the main, central plaza deck outside the palace. In the centre, when Carver stands on his absolute tiptoes, they can see a taller, dark-haired human woman. They can’t see Lila, but he makes the reasonable assumption that she’s there, just short.

Through the crowd, there are rolling sobs, and cheers, calls of _princess!_ and _Lila!_ Resonate through the autumnal leaves around them. Vahn laughs with joy as he looks around at the beauty of this place they have come into.

Lila had described a treetop village to them, when she’d talked about her home, but her description cannot compare to the real thing. Houses built of lacquered white birch wood, some painted with intricate patterns, all of them with some sort of sod on their roofs with the grass in the same autumn colours as the leaves. There are intricate carvings in every handle, every window frame, every door, window boxes of flowers and trailing ivy. This forest village is truly at one with nature.

“Guys!” Lila’s voice comes to them, and the crowd begins parting as she pushes through them, clutching her mothers’ hands and pulling them along behind her, “Rogal?”

  
“ _Ja,_ we’re here, Li!” Rogal calls back, and the parting of the sea of people directs itself toward his voice. All of a sudden, they are once again face-to-face with Lila, beaming so bright that Carver worries her face might crack with the strain of it, tears of joy pouring down her cheeks.

  
“You made it home.” Vahn says, almost soft, with a wild smile on his own face. Lila nods so hard her tiara shakes in her hair.

  
“These are my moms,” she gestures to either side of her. The tall, dark-haired human woman that Carver had seen before stands to one side in a cobalt blue affair, like a sort of simple robe adorned with a sash in silver, intricate embroidery covers the left side of her chest and stretches over her shoulder. She has a tiara in silver to match, set delicately in her dark hair and gleaming with a single beautiful sapphire.  
To the other side is a slightly shorter elven woman, with straw-blonde hair, wearing a matching outfit of green and gold. Her embroidery twines across the right side of her body, and shows a scene of dancing deer and writhing snakes among vines. Her crown matches her wife’s in design, but is gold, with an emerald set into it. 

“This is my mom, Iona,” Lila gestures to the dark-haired woman, “And this is my mom, Rachel.” 

Rachel studies the group for a moment, taking in their exhausted eyes and bruised bodies and sallow, hunger-thinned faces.

“You’ve been looking out for her whilst she’s been gone?” She asks, and they all share glances.  
  


“Mostly Carver and Rogal,” Vahn admits, gesturing to the two in question, who wave. Rachel’s dubious expression breaks into a warm smile that crinkles her eyes as she offers a handshake to each of them in turn. Rogal is especially enthusiastic about this.

  
“Thank you, from the bottom of our hearts. You look famished- come in for the night, we’ll have lunch made.”

  
“Th- uh, thank you, ma’am.” It’s Ashen to reply with a little incline of his head, and Iona raises her eyebrows in surprise,

  
“Oh- no. Not here. Come, Li.” And she waves a hand, parting the crowd and thanking them for their attention as she leads the band of weary young adults into the palace.

  
  
The night goes oddly well. The palace is warmed by hot rocks and firmly contained fires, and the servants seem genuinely enthused both to do their jobs and to meet new faces. It’s something unusual for Carver, at least; at his father’s mansion, the servants had been dead-eyed and listless. They’d hated working there. It’s so _odd_ to see bright-eyed, well-dressed, smiling people coming about them to deliver silver plates of good foods. Stuffed peppers, hearty stew, a healthy serving of cheese and offered wine. Vahn is the most ravenous despite his nerves at being here, ladling his plate with caramelised onions and baked carrots and roasted chestnuts. The others pick carefully, and Iona dismisses the room of all other servants save one, who she waves over to her side.

“Jason,” she says, her voice low, “Would you ensure that there are no… flies on the wall of this conversation?”

Jason, a human man with dark hair and wide shoulders, nods at her once, turns, and moves to a door. He leaves through it, and they hear him call for someone before a thin line of electric blue rimes the doors, then the walls of the room.

“I don’t think we’ll have much time before Jason needs to rest,” Iona flashes a brief, grateful smile at the door, “But, Phoenix, we should sign out on the contract.”

  
“Oh.” Says Ashen, with all the tact of a man who has just been hit upside the head with a quarterstaff, “That.”

  
“You returned our daughter, after all.” Rachel chimes in, already standing to extract papers from her hidden drawer within the table, “That is what we agreed on. Three thousand, with a ten percent cut for the Ô'ayli's-perla, yes?”

  
“Ah,” He continues with his eloquence, “I don’t think that I can accept that, ma’am.”

  
“Whyever not?” Rachel frowns as she returns to sit in front of him, pushing the contract across the table just far enough that she can still reach it. She scribbles her signature onto the parchment.

  
“Your agreement was for a safe and timely return.” He flashes a look to Lila, questioning, “You wanted her to come and stay home.”

  
“Yes? Is that not what you’ve done? I’m confused,” Iona turns to look at Rachel, who shrugs.

  
“I’m not staying,” Lila says quietly, “I have to go.”

The few moments of pure silence are agony. Even Vahn’s clinking of cutlery stops as he looks between Lila and her moms with cheeks full of food.

Iona looks at Rachel. Rachel returns her glance. Iona sighs, closes her eyes, and gently puts her face in her own hand,

“I know,” Iona says, “Rachel has Seen it. The cloaked ones that will seal the fate of the world.” She gestures with her free hand to Rogal, “The Blood Mage was clear in her vision. You were there, too. All of you.”

  
“Blood Mage?” Carver looks over to Rogal, who is wide-eyed and retreating into his chair as though he may be able to sink into his own cloak and through the floor. His eyes flick between those at the table. Ashen and Carver are staring at him with almost horror, Vahn is too busy eating- a relief- and Lila is frowning at her mothers, who are both avoiding her eyes.

  
“He hadn’t told them.” Lila scolds Iona, and Rogal, with a strain to his voice, says,

  
“ _I hadn’t told_ **_you_ ** _!_ ”  
  


Lila looks over to him and rolls her eyes,  
  


“I’m not dumb, Rogal! I’d figured it out. Still,” she turns back to frowning at Iona, who does look up apologetically at this.

  
“Sorry,” She winces to Rogal, looking to Ashen and Carver. The two dubious ones share a look with one another, and Ashen groans and forces himself to relax.

  
“This might as well happen.”

  
“That’s the spirit!” Rachel beams. Iona stands and moves to the door Jason had left through, cracking it open,

  
“It’s alright,” the others hear her say softly, and the electric blue rime around the room dies away, “You can both come in. Eat and recharge a little.”

Iona returns to her seat, trailed by a tired-looking Jason, who is holding a smaller human woman with a sheen of sweat over her dark skin. She leans heavily on him as they make their way to sit at the table, and he sits her down, murmuring questions about her health. She dismisses him with a handwave, and pulls over a bowl of roasted carrots to begin quietly munching on.

“Friends, these are my two most trusted… employees?” Iona makes it into a question as she waves to Jason and his friend, “Spies? Allies?”

  
“You can call us friends, Iona,” the exhausted human woman replies with a quick smile, “That’s what we are.”

  
“Friends.” Affirms Iona, returning her smile, “That’s Merryl, and the quiet one is Jason.”

Jason lifts a hand in greeting and says nothing.

“They’re both invaluable assets and reliable friends. If you need anything, they are people you can trust.”

  
“Hold on,” Ashen points at Jason, “You’re my contact, aren’t you? For the Ô'ayli's-perla?”

  
Jason gives him a dull smile. It’s genuine, tired, doesn’t quite reach his eyes but he tries,

  
“Intuitive. They always told me you were. Hello, Ashen.”

  
“Hi,” Ashen says, somewhat taken aback by his real name. At this, Rachel startles a little,

  
“I’m so sorry! We didn’t get your names?”

The rest of the meal passes with relative ease. As Merryl and Jason recover, they chip into the conversation, keeping Lila updated on what’s happened since she left, on the information that Sabra is getting from the other Sentinels, everything good. They tell her about Ophelia, how she’s found new friends and suffered great losses, with emphasis on the friends. It’s rare for Ophelia to meet anyone new, after all, being bound on a storm-stricken mountaintop with not even birds for company for centuries on end.

The conversation winds down slowly after a dessert of delicious pastries is served by a somewhat-chubby blue hellborn with a beautiful dress and a friendly smile, and Lila’s yawn is the thing to finally clue her mothers in on the fact that she- and the rest of her friends- are exhausted. It’s nearing midnight, after all, and Merryl is resting her head on Jason’s shoulder, half asleep already.

“We’ve kept you so long, I’m sorry. There is time yet to talk, you’re welcome to stay as long as you like, and we’ll make preparations for when you leave. We have guest quarters- ah. I’ll take you- Jason, take Merryl to bed, will you?” Iona shifts her attention across the table.

  
Jason gives her a firm nod, nods to Ashen, sweeps Merryl up, and heads out. Iona smiles as he leaves, then stands, patting her wife’s shoulder as she does.

  
“I’ll see you in bed.” She tells Rachel, who nods at her, looking exhausted herself. Then, Iona waves to Lila and her friends, beckoning them to follow her. None of them have the willpower left to deny.

Iona sees them all seen to individual guest quarters, which are just as lovely as the rest of the palace. The floors in the rooms are tiled, but there is a plush rug just beside the bed to step onto in the mornings, and a large, circular rug in the centre of the space of the chamber, with intricate decoration in green and gold. A vanity cabinet stands in one corner, next to a wide bay window with heavy velvet green drapes tied back with some sort of gold rope. There’s a bedside cabinet with a mug set atop it for water, and an adjoining ensuite bathroom. All in all, it’s very pleasant. The bed is four-poster with cotton sheets and a duvet that feels so soft under Vahn’s hand that he thinks he might fall asleep just touching it.

He strips off, throwing his filthy clothes aside and feeling ashamed to even wear them in such a lovely place. Iona had informed them all that there were varying sizes of nightshirts and gowns in the cabinets, and to indulge as they saw fit. There was even the added bonus of magically pumped water, though she had warned that it would be cold at this time of night, in the morning it would be warm again. Well, that’s no problem for Vahn.

He runs himself a reasonably shallow bath in the odd bronze-coloured tub, taking some time to figure out how to adjust the flow of water. There is some kind of soap set in a little dish, a square of pale purple with lavender flowers embedded into it, and he’s very excited to use it. When the bath reaches a level that he’s happy with, he reaches down and gently touches the surface of the water, letting out ripples of blue magic as he heats it.

It’s been a very, very long time since Vahn last had warm water. And even then, it was a hot spring with a vaguely sulphurous scent to it. Mostly, he rinses his face with whatever chill water he can find, and goes from there.

But _soap._ Now, soap is a luxury he has never had. He takes time to lather it in his hands, admiring the scent of lavender it gives off and the way it froths in his grip. He sets the bar back in the dish, and begins scrubbing at his hair and body and face, gently at first, and almost viciously as time goes on. It feels almost as though he is beginning anew, pulling away the layer of grit and grime and evil and leaving it in the bathwater. When he steps out and grabs a fluffy cotton towel, he looks back at the murky water and shivers in the cool night air.

Maybe he _can_ start again.

He towels himself and his hair viciously, and heads back into the bedroom to pull on a nightshirt and a pair of cotton pants with a drawstring that almost slough right off of his frame until he pulls the tie tight and knots it in a bow.

He climbs into the impossibly soft bed, shivering not from the cold but from the sheer amount of luxury that his life has never afforded him before. There are people, he knows, that go their whole lives without so much as seeing a hair of things like this.

It’s incredible.

He settles into the soft pillows, pulls the quilt up to his chin, and closes his eyes to sleep.

In Carver’s room, he finds himself walking around first, pulling the curtains closed, studying every nook and cranny. He opens the large mahogany wardrobe on the far wall and studies the empty inside for a moment. Then he knocks on the back panel. Satisfied that it isn’t hollow, he closes the door and moves to the vanity to check for secret doorways or trapdoors, peepholes, traps. Anything that could endanger him.

He hasn’t been so paranoid when he’s been sleeping rough with Lila and the others. He trusts them to keep him safe, which is odd, because he doesn’t trust anyone.

The bed is very soft, he finds, with curtains that close around it. They’re thin, but mostly opaque. He’d have a better time seeing out than anyone would seeing in, which lends an air of comfort.

He moves through to the bathroom to inspect the tiling here, too. He finds no secret access passages, no trapdoors, no peepholes. Just a magically-fuelled bathtub that runs cold water over his fingers when he turns it on. There is a little bar of soap with dried orange rind embedded into it, and he figures that nothing can be harmed by him washing his hair quickly, so he does. It’s cold, and uncomfortable, but he feels so much better when he’s finished that he’s almost relaxed moving back into the bedroom.

He takes his clothes off carefully, routinely, folding them even though they’re filthy and setting them aside, making a mental note to ask Iona if she has washing facilities. He changes into one of the Greenleaf-provided cotton nightgowns and a pair of the cotton pants and sighs at the feeling of cleanliness after so long. He feels gross, getting into bed when he’s so dirty and it is so clean, and he’s genuinely considering taking a quick, cold bath when there’s a knock at his door.

It’s about ten minutes after Vahn settles down to sleep that the weird feeling itching in the back of his brain shapes itself into a coherent thought.

 _I don’t like being alone._

And then, immediately on the heels of that revelation,

_I wish Carver was here._

Vahn turns over and groans into his pillow, beating on it a few times with his fist before he almost aggressively sits up and slips out of bed.

He’s beginning to consider the fact the he’s caught feelings for Carver. It wasn’t so bad when he thought it was just a crush, but something about the forgotten noble makes his heart jump every time their eyes meet.  
Perhaps it’s how badly Carver has subverted Vahn’s entire view of noble’s children, perhaps it’s the shared trauma of a past they won’t talk about. Perhaps it’s the quiet nights they’ve spent together talking about everything and nothing by the fire. Squirrels and desires and fears and dogs, and everything possible in between. Carver has trouble sleeping, and Vahn understands that.   
He also understands from caught whispers from his friends’ mouths that Carver sleeps more peacefully at his side than he has ever before in their presence.  
  


He thinks it’s that last thought that has him here, knuckles stinging lightly from the rap at Carver’s door, heart jumping in his throat. There are footsteps from the other side of the door, and it’s cracked open. He sees the glint of Carver’s dagger, and smiles at him,  
  


“Hey,” says Vahn, hair tousled and damp around his face, eyes wide and anxious. Carver lowers the dagger and lets him in,  
  


“Are you okay?” he asks, as Vahn steps lightly into his room and waits on the edge of the large, fancy rug in the middle of the floor. Carver’s is blue with silver embroidery, to match his curtains. Well, at least the Greenleaf family has a theme.

  
“I’m- I’m okay, I think, I just-” he cuts himself off and sighs, rubbing his face with his hand. Carver, in the silence, sniffs at the air.

  
“Why do you smell like lavender?”

  
“Oh,” that’s a question he can answer, “I felt bad being dirty, so I took a bath.”

  
“I was considering it,” Carver admits, “But I’m too much of a coward to face the cold water.”

  
  
Vahn cocks his head, and begins pacing to Carver’s bathroom, “I can help with that.”

Carver makes a questioning noise and follows, padding along behind Vahn. By the time he enters his own bathroom, Vahn is running the cold water into the bath and has his fingertips trailing the surface in ripples of blue. As the water runs past his hand, it lets out little curls of steam.

  
“Oh.” Says Carver. He’d forgotten that Vahn was a Fire Mage.

  
“C’mere and tell me when it’s right for you.” Vahn gestures to the side of the bathtub, and Carver comes and sits, periodically dipping his hand into the water to test it.

  
“Well,” he says, after a minute or so of running water and nothing else, “I know you didn’t come here to run me a bath. So what’s wrong, Vahn?”

  
Vahn sighs again, shakes his head,

  
“I know it’s dumb,” he starts, hesitant, “But I think I’ve gotten to a point where I… can’t sleep alone? It doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t feel _safe._ ”

  
Carver nods understandingly,  
  


“I get that. I do. But why come to me and not Ashen? He was with you first, wasn’t he?”

  
“He was,” Vahn affirms, “But- well. I’ve heard Rogal and Li talking, about your sleeping trouble. And how it’s been- um- sort of better? Since I joined you? I don’t want to presume that’s the truth, though! It’s just what I’ve overheard-”

  
“It’s true,” Carver cuts him off, “I was worse before you came. So mutually beneficial, then?”

  
“Yeah, essentially. How’s the temperature?”

  
“Good.” Carver smiles, “You can turn the water off.”

The bath is almost half full, the water is warm and coils of steam are rising from the surface.

“So you’re proposing that we sleep together?” Carver arches an eyebrow with the kind of smirk that means Vahn _knows_ he knows what he just said, and Vahn chokes and splutters for a moment through a grin,

  
“Yeah. I don’t wanna sleep alone, you sleep better with me, so-”

  
“I understand.” Carver reaches out and awkwardly pats Vahn’s shoulder, “That sounds fine to me. I’ll be through when I’m done, okay?”

  
“Alright.” Vahn stands, smiles at Carver, and heads through to the bedroom, closing the door to the bathroom behind him.

  
Carver takes the most perfunctory bath he thinks he’s ever taken. Even with deliciously warm water, a luxury he hasn’t had in many months, he’s eager just to get to bed. He’s tired, exhausted, he hasn’t seen a real bed in over a week, hasn’t seen a good bed in much longer, and he no longer feels that gnawing anxiety of being alone when he remembers that Vahn is waiting for him on the other side of the door. A brisk towel down, true hair washing, and he pulls the plug to let the bath drain as he pads his way into the bedroom.

Vahn has already crawled into his bed and picked the side by the wall, covers pulled up to his chin. His bright blue eyes track Carver in the darkness as he comes up alongside and tucks himself under the duvet, turned to face Vahn. There is a smile on the hellborn’s face, unusually soft and warm when he asks,  
  


“Are you alright with hugs and things?”  
  


“I think so,” says Carver. _Please,_ says his brain.  
  


Vahn shuffles over the bed toward him and they slot themselves together. Carver winds an arm around Vahn’s waist. Vahn pulls an arm up and over Carver’s chest. He tucks his head in against Carver’s shoulder and closes his eyes, taking a breath of mingling lavender and orange.

  
“I’m glad I met you,” Vahn murmurs sleepily, “And I’m so glad I couldn’t kill you.”  
  


“Go to sleep, sap.” Carver replies with his smile audible in his voice.

It is the first time either of them has gone to sleep feeling truly content with the moment their lives have found.


	19. Doors Close, Windows Open

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rogal struggles to sleep, and decides on a walk to tire himself out...

Rogal cannot sleep. He’s tired to his bones, but he can’t find anything calm enough in his mind to hold onto long enough to find respite.

He’s been tossing and turning for an hour by the time he grumbles his way right out of bed and puts on a pair of slippers so generously given to him by Lila’s moms, then makes for the door. He pauses before he leaves, and pulls his cloak on over his pyjamas, belts his scythe sheath around his waist, and takes that too.

He eases out of the door into the wide halls of the palace, and immediately feels just a touch lighter for the effort. Still, he doesn’t know where to go from here.

So he decides to take a wander around the village.

It’s mostly quiet in the treetops at night, interrupted only by soft leaf rustling, crickets and midnight insects, flapping bats in the canopy. There are a handful of people milling around, the sorts with a more crepuscular nature, or late-night jobs. One young teen, maybe thirteen, stops on the bridge ahead of Rogal. They have silver-blue hair slicked back, just as his is, only with two antennae strands tipped with glowing blue. Their eyes, and a number of freckles, are that same blue, glowing faintly in the night. They’re holding a large ceramic vase in both arms, and back up when they see him, standing aside- it’s only a single file bridge, after all. They incline their head as he passes and murmurs a soft _thanks_ , and he watches them pad away with thin gossamer wings flickering against their back. He turns around and is met, suddenly, with a figure sat on a pole mere feet from him, legs crossed and watching him with bright pink eyes.

“Can’t sleep, mister Ives?” the stranger asks, and Rogal draws his scythe in panic. This new companion doesn’t even flinch, just keeps the same sage expression, balanced atop a thin wooden pole with crossed legs and hands resting in their lap. They don’t blink.  
  


“Who- ah- who are _you?_ ”

This new person cocks their head, sending a sheet of almost shimmering copper hair falling to their right as they study him curiously.

  
  
“I suppose it makes sense that you don’t remember me. You were so young.” They shake their head and slowly unfold themself to step onto the boarding instead. Rogal does not lower his scythe, even as their full height comes to be nearing a foot above his own, not unremarkable height.  
  


“I’ve met you before?” He asks, completely baffled. He can feel his magic tingling under his skin in fear and anticipation, but he doesn’t dare to free it. The stranger nods, smiles, and looks out over the edge of the boarding fence. Rogal follows their eyes for a brief moment, catches the briefest shimmer of a kind of magenta magic reflecting off of the paper white of the tree trunks. He shifts his eyes back to the stranger, but their attention is still on that magic in the distant trees.

  
“A long time ago,” the stranger affirms without looking at him, “Just after you were born, I think. Your mother came to me. She was scared, when her blood magic manifested in you.”

  
“You met my mother?” Rogal’s scythe drops, and his eyes flash red as he begins winding the crank to fold it up again. The stranger flashes a smile his way and sits on the decking, crossing their long legs again. They wave an arm to their right, inviting Rogal to sit- and he does. He joins them on the deck, crosses his legs just as they have.

  
“Isabelle was a good friend of mine, for a while. Before she moved away. She was born here, you know?”

  
“No,” Rogal says, awed, and the stranger nods,

  
“I’m Sabra,” they introduce themself finally, “I’m glad to see you’re okay. You have exactly the same colour hair as her.”

  
“Can you tell me more about her? Do you know what happened to her? Where she is?”

  
Sabra shakes her head, sadly,

  
“No, I don’t know anything about what happened to her. I’m sorry. But I know some things about her, from when she was younger- do you know how long you and your friends are staying?”

  
“No, but I think we’re staying at least for a couple of days. Li wants to catch up, and we need to rest and figure out where we’re going next.”

  
“Hm,” Sabra lifts a hand and wipes it across the air, leaving a trail of glittering magenta behind. She inhales deeply, then breathes out a thin mist of that same glittering pink that coalesces around the plane of magic and begins to form shapes,

  
“What is that?”

  
“The future,” Sabra murmurs, eyes darting across the shapes as they form like constellations, “This is you and your friends, here,” she points to a shape that looks nothing even remotely like Rogal, “I see your paths meeting another like you. A cloaked hero doing everything they can to save the world. Ah, but they’re a distance,” Sabra shakes her head and wipes away the midair scene, letting the magic drift down like flakes of glitter. Rogal lets out the breath he didn’t realise he’d been keeping in.

  
“So where do we go?”

  
“You follow your heart.” Sabra shrugs, “And you aim for the Forge of the Ancients. I think. Maybe the Apollo Zenith. Either Ophelia or Armenn will be able to help you next.”

  
“And they are… where?”

  
“Constells, both of them. I know Ophelia will be the easiest to get to, if you can find a teleportation pillar… I think Rainfield’s leads to Jousimies.”

  
Rogal gives a firm nod, listening intently to every word that Sabra says, until she finally turns to him and sighs,

  
“We can talk about this, and about Isabelle, tomorrow. You need to go to sleep, you look wrecked.”

  
“I feel it.” Rogal admits, struggling to his feet. Sabra reaches up into the canopy and plucks a single leaf from the tree above. She makes little gestures, murmuring, riming the leaf in magenta before offering it out to Rogal. He takes it.

  
“Goodnight, Rogal.” Sabra inclines her head and bows, so Rogal copies her. When he straightens up, she is gone. He didn’t even hear her leave. So he turns, feeling much lighter in his heart and in his step than he had earlier that night, and heads back to his room.

Even this room feels lighter, less oppressive. He cracks the curtains open just a tad to allow the fractured moonlight in, sets the pink-rimed leaf under his pillow, and settles down to sleep.

He falls way almost instantly into a warm, comfortable void, where no dreams dare to trouble him.

  
  


And so the party collectively decides that they will stick around here for a couple of days, if only to allow Lila time to say goodbye to her family.  
(None of them are admitting to it, but they’re all aware that the future facing them is dangerous. Lila may not ever come home.)

They slip into the village life with little issue, provided and tailored with new clothes in the local style of oranges and whites and browns, they join the citizens in everyday jobs. Vahn joins a local band of young teens on their way to the river and comes back damp and carrying a large ceramic pot of water in each arm, striding ahead of the others and grinning as they laugh and chase him, each clutching their own pot.

Ashen finds solace in Jason more than anything. They train together for the days they spend there, Merryl sits on the sidelines and watches, shifting targets around and creating new regimes using her magic, shouting advice to Ashen and Jason.

 _A little higher,_ she tells Ashen when he aims with his longbow, _Your arrow is fletched slightly bottom-heavy._

At first, it irks him that she is telling him these things. He’s an archer, for the sake of all the Gods- of course he knows how to shoot!  
But, eventually, he starts taking her advice, if only to shut her up. And, well, it turns out that she’s usually right. Merryl seems to have a keen eye for engineering and detail to contest Jason’s physical prowess and martial proficiency. They begin teaching Ashen how to fight in hand-to-hand, and in return, Ashen teaches both Merryl and Jason to shoot, how to hold the bow right, how to fletch arrows, how to find the right string for your bow.   
Ashen and Jason talk about work. About Vahn, and abandoning his contract. About the splinter assassin group that Ashen had no knowledge of, apparently led by Jonathan Collins and a handful of his disgruntled, disenfranchised assassin friends. They’re the bane of the Ô'ayli's-perla, Jason informs him.

“They call themselves The Forsaken,” Jason comments, almost idly, as he mimics Ashen’s actions fletching an arrow, “Those who once died. Or something like that.”

  
“They sound like a problem.” Ashen replies, smearing the pine tar over his string with a thumb. Jason shrugs,

  
“Maybe. They have the right sort of idea, they’re just a little… crazy, I think.”

  
“Understandable, if they’ve died.” Ashen hands his bottle of pine tar to Merryl when she points for it, “It must be hard to keep your mind intact when you’re dead.”

  
“Not as hard as you think!” Merryl replies, chipper, smearing her own pine tar across her arrow, “It’s not that bad, not really. Though it depends where you die, and how long you stay dead. I did have it pretty easy, though.”

  
“You’ve died?” Ashen stops fletching and looks up, wide-eyed. Merryl gives a little _mhm!_ With no sadness behind it. He looks to Jason, instead, who is nodding solemnly,

  
“It was… a task, I think.” he says, eyes darting to Merryl, “She was an intelligence agent for us once. But it went wrong.”

  
“I was shot.” Merryl adds in that same, nonchalant voice, “About six times. But it wasn’t the right time for me to die, and I had more to do… so I came back.”

  
“I… what? How?”

Merryl looks up, head cocked curiously,

“Hm? Well, through the Afterlands. Where else?”

  
“... Okay.” Ashen decides questioning is not going to help him here. And after this air clears, they get back to training, with no worry about The Forsaken or undeath. Only the thrill of a clear bullseye and the pride in a self-fletched arrow.

Rogal spends most of his days trailing along with Sabra, asking questions about his mother as the two of them help with the daily tasks around the town. Wrist-deep in soil to surface the sweet potatoes, he learns his mother’s favourite holiday once was the summer solstice. Whilst re-sealing a roof that had sprung a leak, he learns that she once enjoyed the summer honey wine. Feeding the chickens in the paddock below the palace, he learns about the day she left the village for the love of his father.

“He was a hero that came through here,” Sabra smiles as she takes a cup of seed from the bin and hands it to Rogal to scatter on the stone slabs, “Searching for a little respite after getting lost. He ended up staying for almost a month.”

She ducks to scritch gently at a chicken that has ignored the seed to beg attention from her. Rogal smiles as he kneels to join her,

  
“When he left, he broke her heart,” Sabra smiles with warm fondness at the memory, though there is a sadness reflected there, “She couldn’t live without him. So she left to find him.”

Sabra sighs and lets her hand drop,

“When she came back, I was so happy to find out she’d found him. To find out she’d had you. But… whatever was wrong, Rogal, it scared her. Not just the blood magic, but something else, too- she wasn’t always a Blood Mage, you know?”

  
“ _What?_ ” Rogal gapes, and Sabra nods,  
  


“Yes. She was an Earth Mage first… I’ve seen souls shift colours, but never have I seen somebody shift magics. I asked, but she didn’t answer.” Sabra shakes her head, sighs, “Wherever she is, whatever happened, I hope she’s okay.”

“Me too.” Rogal says quietly, and they both fall silent amongst the gentle clucks of the chickens around them.


	20. Almost Home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rosie's band finds their way to the Forge of the Ancients...

Rosie takes a steadying breath as she lifts the glimmering lapis lazuli dagger and focuses her attention, channeling her magic along its blade to its point. She draws it through the air in a solid, vertical line, leaving red magic burning in its wake. As she sheaths the dagger again, sweat beading on her forehead, the red magic dissipates to leave a thin line of green and blue amongst the backdrop of pink. She gently pokes a finger into the gap and tugs at the edge to test it, peering through to ensure she’s got their location at least mostly right.

“At least this wasn’t as far,” She murmurs to Azer, stepping to one side and pulling the edge of reality like a curtain aside, leaving a hole that Azer and their other companions can climb through. Rosie brings up the rear, stepping through the hole between realms and taking a deep breath of cool, clear air that she didn’t realise she so desperately needed until she got it. It’s such a difference from the muggy, damp warmth of the Hexbright Fen. She withdraws the dagger again to draw it up the line the opposite way, sealing the portal once more before she turns to her friends. They all look exhausted and done in, but they have been travelling through the Glimmer Realm now for nearing eight hours, so it’s understandable.  
  


“We can rest for a while, if you need it?” She offers, but her companions all shake their heads,  
  


“We can go until evening hits,” Azer says, looking around them, “So at least we keep our routine. Do you know which direction we’ve to go?”

One of their friends roots around in their bag for a compass and points them in the right direction, and they begin their trek. They’re close, may even make it to the forge this evening if they find and follow the treeline.

They trudge on. One hour.   
Two.

Three.

They’re all beginning to slow and sway with exhaustion.

Four…

Five, and Rosie holds a hand up, shaking her head, to halt the group,

  
“We’re not getting there tonight. Come on, let’s set up camp for the night, and we’ll start bright and early tomorrow. Azer?”  
  


Azer nods and pulls a pale pink crystal from his pouch, squeezing it between his fingers before quickly setting it on the ground as it begins to flash.   
This is nothing unusual to Rosie’s band of folk, though they are running low on the shelter crystals. As the walls of winding vines and branches begin to form, they work together to set up, digging out a fire pit, hammering in spikes for the spit, filling the basin with coal and brush from the communal endless satchel. Azer steps over to them to swirl his hands around with a blur of gold, and he drops the ball of fire he makes into the pit, watching as it slowly begins to take.

Rosie lays and pins their tarpaulin across the grass and scrambles up the walls as they form the roof to screw the net cap in place, then drops the mesh down where another of their group catches it and spreads it across the tarpaulin like a tent. It’s designed to keep biting bugs out, very useful in this part of the world as spring begins to fade into summer and the world is warm and humming. Rosie climbs back down to help fix the pin seal, helping to straighten out as Azer and the others finish cooking a simple evening meal of porridge and honey, with dried meat rations to complement.

There is little to no conversation over supper, all of them are sweaty and exhausted, eyes heavy and turned down to the earth as they eat their way sullenly through their meal.

  
“Tomorrow,” Rosie says it like a promise, “We’ll do it then. It’s okay, we have time.”  
  


“We have time,” Azer echoes absently, staring into his bowl. The murmur passes around the group. Rosie wonders how many of them still believe it.

  
The night takes them with unease, and they all continue to insist in silence to themselves that time is not running out through their fingertips with each passing second.

  
  


When they wake up in the morning, it is a quick and quiet affair. They cook a quick meal- still porridge, but with berries that have been preserved in honey- and then they clean and pack up their belongings. Rosie takes her new greatsword and, like a hot knife through butter, she cuts an exit through the thick woody stems that form the dome.

  
“Should we take this one down?” Azer asks, flame already licking at his fingertips. Rosie studies the dome, studies the flatlands around them and sighs,  
  


“Yes. It’s too noticeable.”

  
Azer nods, then swirls his hands in a wide circle, creating a ring of flame. The others step back as he sears the dome to ashes, one of the other Mages uses their wind manipulation to disperse the smoke before it can truly raise into a signal. 

It takes about ten minutes before it has burned low enough to blend into the grass. Rosie rubs her eyes free of the smoke as Azer and the Wind Mage begin to clear out the ashes and soot. Eventually, they are ready to move on- they study the compass and the sky, and begin to move out.

Three hours pass before the tops of the trees come into view in the distance. A dull cheer goes up from the group, and spirits are renewed with vigor.

They follow the treeline once they reach it. Stepping along the very edges of a thick pine forest, breathing in the smell of leaf litter and pine needles. It’s pleasant and refreshing, and strong enough that they do not, at first, smell the faint sulphur and smoke in the air. In fact, they don’t notice that subtle change until the top of the Forge of the Ancients crests over the top of the trees in their vision, a towering, pagoda-style building with crimson rooftops and elegantly sloped eaves, decorated around the edges with tiny tinkling bells and charms that sound in the wind as they grow closer. 

The building itself isn’t the most specifically coherent, seemingly built as a single-storey that has been expanded over time into the square tiers above, a small handful of different architectural styles gracing the tower as a whole. The traditional rounded white-marble buildings of rainfield, with their painted clay-smoothed rooftops, litter the bottom in short distance gaps. Instead of their usual cobalt blue roofs, though, they have the same crimson as the tiers of the pagoda.

There are people, as Rosie and her band step up the incline of sandstone stairs, passing under the spirit gates with expressions of awe. None of them had been expecting a place like this, with sanctity written into each lovingly-placed brick, carved into the thin runes and circles on the spirit gates in ancient languages, begging the Gods above for protection in this space.   
As they reach the top of the stairs and pass under the third of the spirit gates, a bell chimes from the top of the pagoda- or bell tower, they suppose- and the people milling around here all freeze to watch them approach.

A band of five, led by a goblin in a heavy black cloak, with a sidekick of a golden half-dragon with luminous eyes, they must be quite a sight. Their companions are far less conspicuous, save for their matching black cloaks pulled tight around them.

There are wide eyes and murmurs as the group pads into the centre of this lush green clearing, the pine trees around them no longer enough to mask the smell of brimstone that permeates the air around the central building. They stop, as an older elven gentleman holds as hand up to them and approaches, shuffling in place and full of unease,

“Well met, strangers,” The elf says with a smile that doesn’t meet his eyes. He’s guarded and cautious, and Rosie does not blame him for being so,

  
“Well met,” Rosie greets in reply, inclining her head. The elf seems somewhat reassured by this, at least,

  
“What business have you here, friends?”

  
“We seek Armenn Forget,” Rosie says, unclipping the rune-etched leather pouch from her belt to display for the elven man, “On request of Ophelia Loz’nt, implored with the fate of the world at stake.”

The words are carefully rehearsed. Ophelia had taught her the scripts for when she was stopped, because they had known she would never be permitted to walk through unhindered. Racism toward goblins is still strong, even in religious circles. Still, the elf’s eyes widen, and he nods, waving a hand,

  
“Ophelia… a name we haven’t heard in decades. Follow me.”

  
He leads them up a winding, rickety-looking staircase that proves to be far sturdier than it first indicates from the ground. They follow him through the main entrance to the base of the pagoda, and for just a moment, their find their breath stolen.

The room they enter is vast and beautiful, with polished black granite tiles for the floor, reflecting the candles that seem to be floating above them, suspended on red metal plates with hair-thin, near-transparent wires connected to the sloped ceiling. The rafters here are painted the same crimson as the roofs outside, and have a number of tiny metal decorations hanging from them, tinkling gently in the faint summer breeze drifting in from outside.

The elven man holds a hand up to halt them again, inclines his head,

  
“Please wait here whilst I consult the Sentinel,” He instructs, gesturing to the room as a whole, “I will be back soon.”  
  


Rosie and her friends incline their heads and, as he makes his way through a door to the back, they wander around and study the decorations and the floating staircase that leads to the floor above.

  
“I’d be terrified to walk on this,” Rosie murmurs, running her hand over the staircase. The stairs are some sort of translucent red glass, or gemstone, with obvious magic running through the cracks and fractures. Azer, at her side, hums in agreement, studying it himself,  
  


“I’m sure it’s sturdy, but only because of the magic. What do you think is fueling it?”  
  


“The sentinel, probably.” Rosie replies, and they turn away to study the paintings on the walls telling stories of those that have studied here. Illustrations of weapons and armor and trinkets made, wishes for the forge to be protected and prosper. Azer draws Rosie’s attention to the little bells and tinkling decorations strung from the rafters above them, 

  
“I know you don’t read Stout,” He says, flashing her a brief smile, “But the inscriptions here say that each of those little decorations was made by someone whose life was improved by being here. Some of them were students, some of them were monks. And some of them were just travellers, who came here in search of respite, and found it. Each one of them is imbued with the gratitude of its maker. How lovely is that?”

  
“I wonder what we should make before we leave?” Rosie says, almost absently, as she stares across the roof. Azer’s face splits into a bright smile.  
  


“I was hoping you’d say something like that.”

  
“Excuse me,” The voice of the elven gentleman interrupts their thoughts, and they turn to him quickly, and find him smiling. This time, it is a genuine sort of smile, reaching his eyes and filled with warmth, and Rosie relaxes at the sight. The group re-gathers ahead of him at a gesture, and he steps aside and holds the door open,  
“The Sentinel is happy to have your presence,” He tells them, gesturing with a free hand, “Follow the stairs, and try to keep your balance.”

  
“Thank you,” Rosie inclines her head and takes the lead, stepping into the dark, torch-lit staircase of hewn stone, her friends pad behind her.

It seems to take simultaneously seconds and hours to pass through the dark spiral, stepping carefully, until there is a light ahead of them that seems a vivid orange.

Suddenly, the walls around them disappear, and the staircase stretches out unsupported, now that red gemstone crackling with magical energy. Rosie takes a heavy breath as she steps into the warm, vast chamber and tries her damndest not to look down.    


  
She fails to resist looking down.

  
Her breath catches in her throat, and she almost trips before catching the vertigo and steadying herself. The staircase stretches out over a low, but bright basin of lava that seems to flow upward in thin lines, spiralling around a tall stone platform that the stairs lead down to. The sound of metal on metal rings out as a red-haired dwarf strikes a piece of glowing hot orange metal with an iron hammer, not looking up as Rosie and her friends approach and pick their way carefully over the thin lava rivers. They converge at a stone well on the far side of the platform, seemingly the spot that the dwarf heats her metal.

When all five of them step onto the platform and fan out in polite silence, the dwarven woman sets her hammer and metal down and turns to face and study each of them in turn.

“You’re here from Ophelia?” She asks, and Rosie nods, lifting the bag of amber glass shards and offering them out,

  
“The Solis Speculum was broken,” she explains as the dwarf- presumably Armenn- takes the bag from her and opens it to inspect the pieces, “Ophelia said that you’re the only one that can fix it.”

  
“Aye, prob’ly.” Armenn is frowning, “S’been many a century since last I saw this. I can fix it, though, given a couple o’ days and a Solar fragment.

Rosie blanches.  


  
“A- a solar fragment?” She asks, voice trembling, “We don’t- we don’t have one.”

  
Armenn nods, almost sadly, “Ah, then, you’ll have t’ get one. Or get someone t’ get one for y’.”

  
“Where- where do we find them?” Rosie looks at Azer, who looks just as baffled as she does, “Where do we go?”

Armenn sighs, sets the bag of shattered glass aside, and turns back to the group as she lifts a hand and sweeps a panel of rust-coloured magic into the air, exhales, and when she blinks again, her eyes are gone. In their place, there is a shadowed scene that projects itself in rust tones on the magical screen ahead of her, of figures in cloaks climbing up a mountain. The mountaintop is shadowed against a large, full moon, with the second hanging to the back right in its waning phase. The silhouette of Ophelia stands atop the empty ring of golden metal, staring out as the cloaked figures gather ahead of her and bow,

“The Mangle,” Armenn says in time with the movement of Ophelia’s voice, “Only in chaos can true good and evil be found. That is what you must seek.”

  
“The Mangle,” Rosie murmurs, turning to Azer, who looks just as confused as she does, “What’s the Mangle?”  
  


“I have no idea,” Azer says, gesturing back to the scene of the future that Armenn is projecting for them. 

Ophelia steps off of the hoop and floats, lightly, to the mountain in front of the cloaked figures. There are five in total, and she steps forth to take each of their hoods down in turn. An elven woman first, wearing a tiara that catches the moonlight in tiny gemstones embedded. Then, an exhausted-looking human man with under-eye circles as dark as his hair, and an expression of determination written into his eyes. A Cryptic Eye hellborn with delicate white-lace patterns in his eyes, shadowed by a puff of wavy hair. Another hellborn, a Change Bringer, with their phoenix feathers growing in long and their shoulders pulled back out of confidence or anxiety, it is impossible to tell. Finally, a fifth human man. Unremarkable, to see at first, with pale hair slicked back with some kind of grease, and bright eyes that hold just as much determination as his friends.    
When she sees him, though, Ophelia’s face splits into a bright grin that is a complete juxtaposition to the tears in her eyes-

Armenn coughs and drops to her knees, the scene and her magic dissipating as she begins to hack as though choking on something. Rosie and Azer dart in immediately to help however they can, lifting her up and asking murmuring questions about whether she needs a drink. She waves them away as she mutes the last of her coughs, patting her own chest,

  
“Sorry,” she says, and her voice is hoarse, “There are so many timelines that split there. I- I don’t know- I couldn’t attach to one. It was like they were just…” she makes a poofing gesture with her hands, shakes her head. Rosie pats her back gently, and looks around the group,

  
“So what do you think we should do?”

  
“Rest,” Azer answers before anyone else can speak up, “We need to rest. We’ve been non-stop for weeks, Rosie, we need… a couple of days to breathe.”

  
“I’m with you, don’t worry.” Rosie inclines her head, “We still need to make our little trinkets for the…” she gestures vaguely upward, and Armenn beams at this,

  
“I’m very glad you’re willing to participate.”

  
Rosie smiles back, “Of course. What’s tradition if you don’t stick to it?”

  
“True.” Armenn smiles warmly, though she still looks somewhat worn down from her experience with the vision. She shifts past the others and heads toward the stairs, “Then  come on, let’s eat and get you all settled in for a while.”

She makes her way up the stairs, trailed by a group of exhausted kids that should never have had the weight of the world placed on their shoulders.


	21. When The World's At Stake

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lila's party get around to leaving Gleamsheath...

“Do you have everything?” Iona asks as Lila tightens the buckles on her backpack,  
  


“I think so?” She cocks her head, a slight frown on her face, “I have Peanut and Aubergine, I have my staff, I have spare clothes, a cloak…”  
  


“Food and water,” Vahn chips in, “We have rations, waterskins are full. Any crystals anyone is running low on?”  


  
There passes a good thirty or so seconds of quiet rustling as they all withdraw their various pouches and storage options, and they flick through their supplies counting up what they need,  
  


“I could do with a few more for flying,” Carver says, “I’m all out.”  
  


“I am running low on lightning and gravity,” Rogal adds, shaking a couple of empty crystals out into his hands. Iona nods and steps in to take some empty crystals from Rogal and Carver,

  
“Flying,” She says, twisting one of Carver’s crystals in her fingers and imbuing it with a rich silver-blue glow, “How many?”  
  


“Five, if you’re able?” He winces a little, “Sorry.”  
  


“Don’t worry,” Iona smiles at him with more motherly affection than Carver has seen in years, “It’s no struggle.”  
She puts magic into five of his crystals and hands them to him, then turns to Rogal with electricity already crackling around the crystals in her palm,  
“How many for you?”

  
“Ah, hm. I don’t really know? Maybe three?”  
  


“Four,” Vahn chips in, “I’ll need one disposable to test installs. Sorry, Iona.”

  
“You all worry too much.” Iona replies, closing her hand around four of the crystals still in her palm, she hands the empty ones back to Rogal, then hands over the newly-imbued lightning crystals.

  
“Thank you,” Rogal inclines his head as he packs the crystals away, and Iona gestures to Lila,

  
“Li can help you with gravity. It’s what she’s best at.”

  
“Oh?” Rogal raises his eyebrows as he looks over at her, “I always thought that you were just for growing plants?”  
  


Lila flushes and looks away, shoulders hunching, “Well! I wasn’t always very good at it, you know. So I try to practice a lot.”

  
“You should get going,” Rachel interrupts with a voice so sad and soft that it breaks their hearts, and she begins to lead them down the wooden staircases to the forest floor, heading for a stone archway filled with rippling magenta light. Waiting for them at the side stands Sabra, eyes glowing in the dim like, looking as though she might pity them. They fan out ahead of the curtain of magic, Iona and Rachel stood at one side of the arch, Sabra at the other. She looks each of them over, studying them, then steps up to Rogal,

  
“Here,” She says, holding a sheathed dagger out to him, “This is what you’ll need to get out. Be careful with it.”

  
“What is this?” Rogal asks as he takes the dagger and slips it carefully from its sheath. The handle is some kind of polished, pale wood covered in an oiled lacquer, details of thin silver wire winding around it and holding in place what appears to be a blade of lapis lazuli. Double-edged, a reasonably short blade at around six inches, and with so many fractures that there’s no way it’s structurally sound.

  
“It’s a Realm blade,” Sabra steps in to resheath it in his hands, “With this, you can cut into the Boundless Realm from any other that touches it. It can be a task, though, and only those with… a certain bloodline, lets say, are able to control it.”

  
“Oh,” Says Rogal quietly. Sabra frowns, tucks a piece of hair behind her ear. 

  
“You can’t doubt yourself,” She tells him, setting a hand on his shoulder, “Not for a moment. Your friends need you. Your mother needs you. Let me tell you what you have to do,”

They spend a good ten minutes in that little clearing, lit by the pink of the archway, as Sabra teaches Rogal the steps of cutting through reality. A single slice, top to bottom, as straight as you can make it. All the magic you can muster, focused on the very tip of the blade. And again in reverse to seal it, and it must _always_ be sealed.

“The portals were made to minimise how much the Realms overlap,” Sabra tells him as he folds the dagger in a piece of cloth and tucks it into his bag, “There will always be ways around the portals, but not everything that wants to shift between Realms has honourable intentions, especially not in the Glimmer Realm.”

  
Rogal nods firmly, and Sabra addresses all of them,

  
“Do not stop, no matter how tired you are. Do not rest in the Glimmer realm. You  _ must _ stay focused on making this journey a shortcut, and don’t let anything stray you from that. Don’t give anything your name, don’t eat anything offered to you, and don’t make deals with anyone you find there. Keep hold of something iron, just in case. Magic and iron are the only things that work. Did you get all that?”

  
“Trust no-one, don’t sleep, burn ‘em with fire.” Vahn checks off on his fingers, and Sabra smiles as she nods,

  
“Yes, that’s about accurate. Alright, you’re ready. Iona, Rachel…” Sabra sweeps an arm to them, and both of Lila’s mothers duck in to give her one last kiss to the hair before they step back and clear the way to the portal.

  
“Good luck,” is the last thing they hear from Sabra before they’re stepping through the curtain of pink magic and plunging into an abyss of glitter and sunlight.

The world drops out from under them in every sense of the idea. They’re falling into what feels like infinity, stars and universes flashing before their eyes, whole worlds spinning in their peripheral. The light around them grows brighter, and brighter, until it’s blinding and they have to shut their eyes against it. It burns, it hurts, and they scream-

And then they fall onto grass, tumbling and panting, throats hoarse with screams that they never got to hear.

For a few moments, there is only the sound of panting, a gentle breeze, and some sort of twittering in the distance. The grass under their cheeks smells faintly of ozone, moreso even than the usual damp earth of their home Realm. Lila is the first one to stand up, more used to the terrible journey than the others, and she brushes herself off as she looks around.

“Not much has changed,” she comments, “A little bit more of a path, maybe.”

  
Rogal coughs as he pushes himself up onto one elbow, wincing with a phantom pain that doesn’t quite make itself to reality. He looks up at her, too winded to make words, and she startles a little bit as she hops over to offer him a hand up.

The group picks themselves up eventually, dusting themselves off and staring at this new world around them.

It’s some sort of warped reflection of the world they’d left, with trees reaching impossible heights, and the floor under their feet a leaf-strewn bed of grass. Through the branches at the top, they can see the single moon that graces this Realm, a copy of the Boundless’ Pompus moon, but bigger and brighter and impossibly beautiful. Most curious, though, is the colours.

Everything is some sort of pastel blue-purple-pink in varying shades. The grass under their feet is softly waving pale pink and almost glittering in the faint purple moonlight. Even the night sky above is almost bright, a blue-purple that accents everything around it.

“Pretty much everything here is made of magic,” Lila explains, beckoning them to begin moving in a direction that they don’t quite understand, “When Gaia fell to Caertium, a bunch of little filaments fragmented off of the Boundless Realm. This one, the Glimmer, is all about the light and the magic. So, of course, most of the magical people live here- Pixies, Faeries, Treefolk… everything with blood that runs with magic, this is the best place for them to rest. It’s not so great for the rest of us, though! Because everything is so magical, it can be hard to control.”

As if testing her theory, like a fool, Vahn wills a tiny flame to the open palm of his hand. He  _ yelps _ when a huge jet of flame sparks and winds upward, and he quickly throws his whole self into extinguishing it, panting with adrenaline once it’s gone. Some branches about fifteen feet up bear a burn mark, but thankfully, it hadn’t lasted long enough to set them alight.

“That’s exactly what I mean.” Lila gestures brightly, “Don’t do that.”

  
A few moments of trickling silence where Ashen puts his face in his hand, Carver winces at him, and Rogal tries to hide the fact that he’s vaguely annoyed with a smile, and Vahn replies,

  
“Yeah. Noted. I’ll listen better next time.”

  
“Good.” Lila smiles at him, then turns to continue into the forest. The others follow faster than Vahn does, Carver pats his shoulder sympathetically as he passes, and Ashen stops beside him until he shakes himself into moving.

  
“Wow,” He says flatly, and Vahn shakes his head,

  
“Don’t.”

  
“That was… something.”

  
“Shut up.” Vahn gives a little snort of laughter, and when he looks to Ashen, the other hellborn has a small amused smile on his face as they trudge in the footsteps of their friends.

They try to keep a mental grip on that idea in their minds.  _ Shortcut. _ But what  _ is _ a shortcut? How can this be a shortcut if it’s just the same as the Boundless Realm?

“Focus,” Lila will hiss whenever one of them seems to drift off just a bit too much, “Keep your mind focused.”

They try, but it gets to be almost like holding a fish in a fast-running river. It takes them too long- by Lila’s estimate at least- to get out of the forest that reflects the Boscage and its surroundings. They step out into meadowlands at last, though, taking breaths of almost relief. Vahn looks back over his shoulder for a moment at the forest,

  
“That should have taken longer, right?” He asks, frowning, “That’s four hundred miles. How did we walk that in a few hours?”

There is no reply.

He turns back around with Lila’s name dying on his lips as he stares out over a beautiful pink meadow with glittering blue wildflowers swaying in the wind, and absolutely no sign of his friends.

“Ah,” Says Vahn, “Shit.”


	22. There Are Lives To Save

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The squad notices that Vahn is no longer with them...

“Where did he _go,_ Li?” Carver asks, almost frantic at the foot of an enormous mountain range with trees scattered around them, “He was _right behind me._ ”  
  


“I don’t know!” Lila replies, panic strewn through her voice, “He must have gotten distracted! I told you guys to stay focused!”  
  


“Okay, okay, breathe,” Rogal tries to calm them, “When was the last time you remember seeing him? Or hearing him?”  
  


“Um,” says Lila frowning, “It was… a few hours ago. He was saying about how weird it was that it didn’t take long through the forest, so I was telling him about personal time dilation…”  
  


“Did he reply?” Carver asks, and when he puts his hand on her arm, his grip is tight and worried. Lila thinks about it, blanches,  
  


“No.”  
  


“Fuck,” Carver turns back in the direction they’ve just come from, “Vahn!”  
  


“Carver,” Lila reaches out and swipes at his arm as he goes to run off, keeping her eyes on him firmly, refusing to blink, “Rogal, get hold of Ashen. Carver, stop- we can’t afford to get more fractured!”  
  


“If we lose you, too, we’re way more fucked.” Ashen agrees, allowing Rogal to keep a hand on his shoulder for whatever reason, regardless of the vague discomfort.  
  


“We have to keep our focus together, or we’ll get split up again. Just- come here. Sit down,” She says, pulling at him. There are tears in her eyes from the lack of blinking, but she can’t afford to blink until she has his focus. Carver turns back to her, pulling in a breath and letting himself relax. All four of them take a seat in the shorter, coarser mountain grass, pink heather bushes scattered at varying distances. Some kind of sheep-like creature munches merrily on one not too far from them, watching.  
“Focus,” Says Lila, “We have to focus. Let me think, okay? As long as we’re not moving, we don’t move.”

  
“Uh,” Says Ashen, “Yes, that’s… the idea.”

  
“Not what I mean,” Lila looks at him sternly, “Were none of you listening to me talking about personal time dilation?”

There’s an awkward silence, which Rogal chips into,

“I heard it, I just didn’t really understand.”

Lila sighs and buries her face in her hand, “Okay. Okay- so, when we have eyes on each other, we share the same time. I don’t know exactly how that works, but look,” She lifts her face again to look at the other three, one at a time, “I see you. An hour for you is an hour for me. We have the same focus, too, so we have the same time. An hour for you is an hour for me.”

  
“Okay…” Ashen looks as though he’s trying to swallow something a little too big for his throat, and Lila flashes him an apologetic smile,

  
“If one of us has a different focus, and none of us have eyes on them, then their time is different to ours. If I had closed my eyes when Carver was trying to leave, even if I’d just blinked and none of you were looking at him, then we would have had a different sort of time. He was worried, he wanted to find Vahn, he wanted to get back to where he last saw Vahn. So, maybe an hour for him would be... a day for me. Does that make sense?”  
  


“Very vaguely,” Rogal answers, to murmurs of agreement from Ashen. Lila smiles sympathetically,  
  


“This is sort of normal for me, but it was hard when I first got here.” She tells them as calmly as she can, “The best way I can sort of explain it is… that time is fake, and that your time is whatever the Glimmer Realm thinks you should have it be.”  
  


“That makes no sense, but it does make my head hurt less.” Rogal nods at her, smiles, “So… what are we going to do about Vahn?”

  
Lila goes from smiling at him, to frowning in the span of that sentence, looking as though she’s wracking her mind and coming up empty. Carver sighs, stands, keeping his eyes on Lila,

  
“Time is… it doesn’t mean anything to me. I can find him. Give me just… give me a couple of hours, for you. Okay?”

  
Lila looks up at him with her face twisting, tears forming in the corners of her eyes. Carver catches her gaze and tries with all his might to convey his stoic sort of confidence to her. She looks back at Ashen and Rogal, who share her sort of uncertainty. But she turns back to Carver and sighs, gently.

“Okay.” She says. Carver nods once, turns away from them, and takes a breath, “I’ll see you soon.”

Lila closes her eyes. The boys blink.  
Carver is gone.

“Will he be okay?” Ashen asks, looking out in the direction that Carver left. Lila sighs,  
  


“We have to believe he will be. Belief is everything here.”  
  


“I believe it.” Rogal shrugs, “I trust Carver. He’s smart, he’s strong, he’ll be fine.”

  
  


Carver doesn’t know how time works here, but it doesn’t matter much to him. He’s used to time blurring around him from lack of sleep, the fact that he’s been sleeping better lately does nothing to alleviate that. And he has been enjoying that. The sleep. The happiness. Warmth.

So that’s what he focuses on when he takes his steps out into the glimmering meadows and scrublands. It feels like hours, he knows that isn’t quite right but it is uncomfortable. What do hours feel like?

Do they feel long? Are they meant to? Or are they meant to feel like a dizzy sort of feeling when he wakes up with a grounding weight on his shoulder and doesn’t need to panic to remember that it’s Vahn, asleep on him. Because that’s what hours have felt like, lately, in Gleamsheath, in the mornings. He wakes up earlier than Vahn, because he can’t shake every habit, but he’s felt comfortable for the first time in many years.

Time, or whatever it isn’t, it slips past him as he walks. With purpose, he walks, and something about it feels… weird, different, even to their usual travel. They walked for hours getting to the mountains. He walks the inverse heading back.

“Shit,” he hears Vahn’s voice echo some sixty feet out to what he thinks is his right, though direction is meaningless right now, and he turns toward it. Pink spins in his vision, and then he sees the ginger hair of the hellborn, shoulders pulled up and for a moment, he sees Vahn panicking in reverse, running from- to- his spot just outside the forest as their interpretations of time war it out to see who will win.

  
“Vahn,” He reaches out, and then there is a hand on Vahn’s shoulder and the world stops spinning around Carver in a sudden rush of a stop, almost shaking him off of his feet.  
  


“Carver!” Vahn exclaims, turns, and throws himself right into Carver’s offered hug, “I was freaking out for a minute, thought I’d lost you guys.”

  
“You sort of did. Here,” Carver offers his hand, which Vahn readily takes, and they begin to walk, “Good. So it seems time works a little oddly, here. It adjusts itself to you.”  
  


“What?”

  
“Ah, how did Lila describe it… an hour for me might not be an hour for you. That’s why I’m holding your hand. We left you behind, and didn’t realise for hours, because they weren’t hours to us. I spent hours coming back, too, but… I think I went backwards?”  
  


“What?” This is only serving to confuse Vahn even more, and Carver chuckles.  
  


“The others didn’t get it either. Nor do I, really. Basically- just hold my hand. Don’t let go.” And he squeezes Vahn’s hand. He glances back at him and finds the hellborn looking at him with wide eyes and a blush dusting his cheeks. Carver has never noticed before, but Vahn has odd ears- he supposes that they’re usually tucked away under the fluff of his hair but now they’re somewhat droopy, a sort of animalistic style and pulled back.  
“Don’t look at me like that.” Carver rolls his eyes, smiling, as they walk on. Vahn raises an eyebrow that Carver doesn’t see,

  
“Why not?”

  
“Just trust me.” Carver squeezes his hand again, “You don’t want to go there.”

There’s a moment of silence, and Vahn thinks so hard about asking,

_‘But what if I do?’_

But he doesn’t. He bites his tongue. He holds Carver’s hand. He doesn’t press.

_‘I know,’_ Jester’s voice comes in the back of his mind, and it’s a shock after days of quiet from his friend, _‘That’s just how Carver is. He doesn’t trust himself. He doesn’t like himself. It’ll take time to convince him that you_ **_do.’_ **

Vahn can’t reply without Carver hearing, but he does nod a little in response. Jester gives a breath of almost-laughter, maybe relief, and his presence retreats from Vahn’s mind.

They walk on.

  
  


It has been an hour by the mountainside, and Lila is growing nervous. Her family has always told her that resting in the Glimmer Realm is dangerous, that time is a tide that can turn any moment, but she makes sure that one of them has their eyes on the other at all times. She wills for Carver’s success, for him to be fast, for him to be safe. Across from her, she hopes her friends are doing the same. The power of a shared thought is always so much larger than a single one.

And so, when there is a footfall an hour and a half in, out to their side, they all turn in surprise to find Vahn and Carver coming toward them, both smiling. A rush of relief takes Lila and she sags down, breaks into half-sobs mixed with rustles of almost-laughter. Vahn lets go of Carver’s hand to make his way quickly over and kneel beside her, patting her back,  
  


“Hey! Hey, sorry, I didn’t know time got that weird. I’m sorry, are you okay? Sorry.”  
  


“‘M _ffffi-i-ine,_ ” Lila’s sobs are muffled into her hands, and Vahn keeps spluttering apologies as he rubs her shoulder, waiting for her to stop. Rogal beams up at Carver as he joins them,  
  


“ _Hallo,_ I knew you would be okay.”  
  


“Hm, well,” Carver shoots him a brief smile, “It’s… an experience, but it feels pretty normal. Li, are you alright? Ready to move on?”  
  


Lila, still sniffling and swiping the back of her hand over her eyes, nods, “Yes! I’m fine, we can go. Come on,” And she reaches out to grab Vahn and Ashen’s hands, as the two people to either side of her, “We’re holding hands now.”  
  


“That’s fair,” Vahn agrees. Ashen shifts somewhat uncomfortably, but any necessity is worth discomfort if only to find Jack. He’s not worried about losing his new friends, really, he reasons when he takes Rogal’s hand. They’re necessary. Nothing more.

The journey through the mountains takes a little longer than it should, as Lila tells them. But still, they’re happy to make that sacrifice if it means staying together.  
  
They pass around a boggy, swamp-like area glimmering with tiny floating flames, and Lila clicks for their attention,

  
“Try not to look at the foxfire,” She says, eyes firmly ahead of her, “They like to try and lure you away, and we’re almost at Celustre, where we can move back to the Boundless Realm.”

  
For once, Vahn abides by her instructions. He turns away from the pretty little fires, tightens his grip on Carver’s hand, and they march on, trailed by foxfires their entire journey from there.   
The foxfires are cute, really- a couple of inches high in varying colours, they follow them, floating, as curious as a dog. They sputter on occasion, the only noise they’re really capable of making, and it takes all of Vahn’s willpower not to look at them. Still, he learned that lesson already- the hard way.

They continue past the bog and alongside a river glittering with purple-blue water, reflecting the sky above them which is now lit by the reflection of the Aracanian sun. It hovers above their heads, high, but with no real presence to it. It doesn’t tell the time, in a place where there is no time. It simply just _is_ there.

The tops of buildings begin to come into view, eventually. A wide lake surrounded by rounded rooftop buildings, decorated in that same pink, blue, purple. Lila guides them across a bridge that seems to be easily a hundred years newer than the somewhat-rotting buildings, and they make their way around the far side of the lake.  
There’s a sense of awe amongst the party. Those that have seen Rainfield, the _true_ Rainfield, recognise this place only by the shape of the lake and the traditional clay-smoothed rounded rooftops around them. It’s far smaller than it is in their world, less busy, with only a few pixies flitting around and paying little attention to them other than to nod respectfully every now and again. Still, the group stays silent as they make their way to the place they were told to go- a darkened ring of mushrooms in the grass aside from a small section of the lake. In their world, it is a towering obelisk of obsidian, standing easily ten feet high and inscribed with golden runes. In this world, however, it appears just as it started out. Not functional here, though, not as in the Boundless Realm.

They find the circle, eventually, after what feels like hours of searching,  
  


“Okay,” Lila says, dropping Vahn and Ashen’s hands, “Rogal… it’s you.”  
  


Rogal swallows, nods, withdraws the lapis lazuli dagger from its place safely stored in his bag, and he unsheaths it. There’s a point of quiet. No water runs, no wind blows, no breath is taken or given. There is just stillness, and the faint glow of blood-red magic coalescing at the very tip of the dagger. Rogal swallows around the nervousness in his throat, raises the dagger, and slices downward.

Nothing.

The magic dissipates from the blade, and Rogal looks to his friends with eyes wide in worry.  
  


“It’s okay!” Lila reassures him, “This is the first time you’re using it. Try again. We’re with you!”  
  
  
Rogal nods, swallows, and raises the dagger again. His magic rolls like blood down the edges of the blade, collecting at the tip as a droplet would. He focuses all that he can into this, into making this work. Into getting them out. Into saving the world.   
Into finding his mother.  
  
There is a bright sheen of red as the dagger comes down this time, perfectly straight and gleaming in the pink sunlight. Lila’s breath catches in her throat as Rogal pulls the dagger back and stares, wide-eyed, at the little line of dull grey-blue and green he can see in the fabric of reality. Cautiously, he pokes at it, and finds his finger goes right through the slit. The other side is cold, the chill of sleet rain hits his hand, and he withdraws, turning to his friends.  
  


“I did it.” He says incredulously, “I did it!”  
  


“Yeah!” Lila is the first to surge forward and throw her arms around Rogal’s neck joyously, laughing, “I told you you could do it!”  
  


“I did it.” Rogal repeats, one arm up to pat Lila on the back, the other holding the dagger out as far from her as possible. Ashen, Carver, and Vahn drop in to him to pat him on the back and congratulate him in the faint, icy wind and splash of rain drifting from the slit in reality. After they draw apart, they study the thin line for a few moments, then Rogal steps forward and gently tugs at the edge of the gap. Like a curtain, it pulls somewhat aside, making the hole a little larger- and it feels odd too. Like he’s touching nothing, but at the same time, there is a faint tingle across his skin where it presses into the edge.  
  


“After you,” Rogal says to Lila, gesturing with his free arm. Lila beams, bows her head to him, and gingerly climbs through the little gap.

Immediately on the other side, she’s struck by chill rain and an icy wind that whirls around her. The sky above is dark grey and clouded, the grass underfoot a frosty green-brown. She steps forward, out of the way, closer to the towering obsidian pillar that she knows is what they’re all looking for.

The others pour out behind her, as she shivers and hugs her arms around herself, padding around the pillar. It’s a good fifteen feet tall and polished to a fine sheen, even in the darkness of the day and the chill of the rain, it gleams as though struck by sunlight. Engraved and filled into it, there are ancient-looking runes and scripts, delicate linework and circles of an archaic arcana, and not a single one makes sense. When she looks up, Rogal has successfully closed the slit between Realms, and Vahn has thrown a celebratory arm around his shoulders, Carver is nodding his approval, and Ashen is patting Rogal’s shoulder.  
  


“You guys,” She calls over to them, and they turn to her, “I can’t read any of this!”

  
The boys approach Lila, shivering in the chill wind, arms pulled close to herself. Vahn shuffles up to her and sweeps his older oilskin from his satchel to set over her, patting her shoulder,  
  


“Stay dry.” He comments, and then turns his attention to the pillar.  
  


The circles are complex, older than Vahn can really comprehend. They’re a style of magic so rarely used now that few people even recognise that it _is_ magic, let alone are able to read it. Even Carver is frowning at the patterns on the other side.  
  


“Are we supposed to be able to read this?” He asks, “It’s just circles and lines.”  
  


Lila shakes her head, shedding raindrops from the hood of the oilskin she has pulled tight around her now,  
  


“No. It’s really, really old magic. Before Gaia was resurrected sort of old.”  
  


“What the fuck?” Ashen frowns, studying one of the runic circles, “How are we supposed to know what sigil is what? Nobody can read this.”  
  
  


“I can,” Vahn says quietly. He paces around the obelisk, slowly, taking in each of the runes and frowning at them all. His friends step back to give him runes, but share curious looks,

“You can read this?” Carver gestures, “How?”  
  


Vahn pauses and shifts his eyes to Carver, then back to the pillar. He’s silent for a few moments, continuing to pad around it.  
  


“I’ll tell you later.” He says eventually, in the same reserved tone that tells the others not to ask any of the questions they’re bursting with. Instead, they let him wander around, murmuring words under his breath and turning his head varying ways, left and right. Blue trails from his eyes faintly as he does so, and for a moment, the others swear they see the ghostly outline of a red hand on his shoulder,

“This one is Jousimies,” he gestures to a circular rune in the higher row of runes, “Or _the city of sunlight water atop a mountain,_ but I think that’s the same thing.”

  
“That does fit Sabra’s description.” Rogal agrees stepping up a little closer, “So how do we… use it?”  
  


“Here,” Vahn offers his hand out to Rogal, who takes it without really considering it. Vahn nods at the others, “Grab hold.”

They make a sort of chain, taking hold of one another, and then Vahn reaches up- having to jump a little to reach- and slaps his hand to the rune he’d indicated and looses a burst of blue magic into it. Immediately, the world twists and shifts around them, and it feels for a few moments as though they may lose their grips on one another. Rogal doubles down, tightening his grip on Vahn and Lila, and then suddenly they’re deposited at the foot of another obsidian pillar at the edge of a lake. Or, in Carver’s unlucky case, dunked directly into the shallows of the lake.

He lets out a little yelp, scrambling up as best he can in the slick mud and pulling himself up onto the bank, finding Ashen and Rogal’s hands already their to pull him up over the edge.

  
“Cold!” He sputters as he stands upright, “Very cold!”

  
Vahn pads over to him and pats his shoulder, heating his shirt just enough that it begins to steam a little in the cool spring air. It should be coming into summer here, soon, in the lower hemisphere. Still, it’s central enough that the mild weather isn’t unusual, and being wet is unpleasant.  
  


“Let’s see if we can find an inn,” Ashen says to the group, turning toward the rooftops a rough quarter mile away from them, where smoke is rising from chimneys and the sound can be heard faintly even from here, “We’ll dry you up, and… rest, I think. I’m tired.”  
  


“I’m fuckin’ _exhausted,_ ” Vahn agrees, looping an arm through Carver’s to continue pumping heat into him, “Let’s go. Lead the way.”

Ashen does, hesitantly, and they others begin to follow him toward the town, drooping with exhaustion and fully ready to sleep.


	23. All I Want Is To Trust You

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The group finally has the chance to rest a night in Jousimies...

“Hi!” Lila says to the odd-eyed half-elf behind the bar, smile bright and in place, “We’re looking for rooms! Do you have any free?”  
  


The half-elf eyes her, hands occupied with cleaning a glass that they do, eventually, set down once their eyes settle on her tiara.  
  


“Aye. Can do that for y’, how many are y’ lookin for?” The eye the group, “One each?”  
  


“Five!” Lila chips happily, and Carver coughs awkwardly to lean in,  
  


“Uh. Four.”  
  


“Four!” Lila corrects without looking back or questioning him, which Carver relaxes gratefully for. He steps back, and Vahn flashes him a little smile, knocks his head gently to Carver’s shoulder.  
  


“Mmm. Four rooms, one double I assume?” They raise an eyebrow at Carver, who flushes, but nods, “A’ight, for that, per night it’ll be eight gold. That okay? Got discounts for longer stays, ‘s’long as y’ pay in advance.”

  
“What do you guys think? We’ll be here a few days, right?” Lila looks at her companions, who make general non-committal gestures,  
  


“I’d say at least three, _ja,_ ” Rogal nods, “But better safe than sorry.”  
  


“Five days’ll get y’ a discount of twenty-five percent, so… thirty gold sound good?”  
  


“Sounds great!” Lila beams again, turfs over the cash with a little tip for the bartender, and they smile gratefully at her as they pull keys from a rack at the back. They get two rooms side-by-side, the other two scattered out over the same floor,  
  


“Got a washroom y’ can use on ground floor. Water’s usually warm, comes from a spring, but it’s public so keep that in mind.”  
  


“Got it. Thank you!” Lila smiles at him and turns to hand out the keys, giving Ashen and Carver the keys for the solitary rooms, and taking the side-by-side rooms for herself and Rogal. They’re on the second floor, so it’s a brief trudge up the stairs to get there, and they split off with tired farewells to their various rooms.

It’s evening by the time they settle in. Rogal sits on Lila’s bed, just to keep her company, his own bags dumped in his room before coming in here. Lila has settled herself on the bay windowsill, staring out the beautiful spring evening sky. The clouds are streaked with bright, vivid oranges and pinks, the very crest of the sky above them turning a dusky purple with the first faint stars creeping into view. The town outside is loud with the sound of people milling around, forgetting that the world could be endangered. It’s nice, at least to Lila, that these sorts of people _can_ live this sort of peaceful life.

“This is what we’re working for, isn’t it?” She asks Rogal in a soft, contented voice, “People being happy?”

“Hm? _Ja,_ I think. It’s part of being good, making sure that as many people as possible don’t have to worry about how they’ll live.” He stands and makes his way over to join her by the window. The mountain air is pleasantly cool against their faces, and the idea of looming darkness is forcefully pushed back in their minds. The people below talk, mill around, children laugh as they barrell through the streets. A cat jumps up onto a rooftop opposite and below them, settles into a little cat-shaped loaf in the dying sunlight and closes its eyes with its tail tip swaying happily by its tucked feet. Lila smiles down at it, looks over her shoulder to where Peanut and Aubergine are sat together in a corner, chomping through a little pot of seed that she’s set in front of them.   
Rogal yawns, and Lila turns back to him,

  
“We should sleep,” She tells him, firm but friendly, “We have to find Ophelia tomorrow.”  
  


“I suppose,” Rogal rolls his eyes and straightens up, rolling his shoulders, “Alright. I’ll see you in the morning. Goodnight, Li.” He shoots her a smile and heads for the door under her quick reply,

  
“Night, Rogal!”

The door shuts behind him, and Lila spends a few more seconds staring out over the town before climbing back in the room and closing the window, drawing the curtains, and changing for bed. She already misses her home, but her determination will see her through, she’s sure of it.

  
  
  


Ashen finds himself alone, and it still feels just as unusual as it has at Lila’s home palace, if not more so. If he wandered out, now, he wouldn’t find Jason and Merryl eating late-night fire-cooked snacks at the hearth in the kitchen for company. He wouldn’t even bump into his new allies- friends?  
Friends is an unusual word for Ashen. He’s only ever had Jack.

  
He changes quickly for bed, once the curtains are drawn on the town below, and scrambles in with the oil lamp beside him lit and the match from his tinderbox smoking itself out on the metal base. He withdraws his little book from his bag and gets to making notes, mostly about The Forsaken, all of the information that Jason had given him. Jonathan Collins, or Grin as he was known to the Ô'ayli's-perla, though he seems to have changed that nickname for this new band of murderers he’s running with. Him and his sister, Sophia, who has a codename that Ashen never found out from any of them. He makes little notes and scribbles of masks that Jason had described, wearing his ink out and snubbing his quill so many times he thinks it might break. It doesn’t, though, just globs the occasional blob of ink onto his page that he has to groan and set aside to dry.

In the time he isn’t focusing, he leans back in his pillows and stares at the ceiling. Everything has been turned on its head for him, in the past few weeks. Even though he hasn’t been scorched by the Ô'ayli's-perla, he still doesn’t feel loyal to them now. He can’t remember the last time he made his own decisions, walked his own path, did something other than what they told him, and he finds himself… a little lost, in the freedom of it all. It’s dizzying, makes him feel a little nauseous, but in a sort of giddy excited way. It’s in no way diminished by the sudden huge leaps he seems to be taking toward finding Jack. Soon…

He falls asleep holding more hope than he’s had in years, the oil lamp beside him slowly flickering out in the early morning hours, his notebook slipping from the bed to fall to the floor, open on the very first sketch of Jack he’d ever cried over.

  
  
  
  


Closing the door behind them brings with it such a relief for Carver that he almost collapses under the weight of it. He hadn’t realised just how much tension he’d been holding until it dropped away from him, and even then, it’s not truly gone.  
Vahn has made his way to the window already with a distant smile that shows in the streaked oranges and pinks reflected in his eyes. He draws the curtains with a steady exhale, and Carver pads quietly up behind him, unbuttoning his still-soaked shirt, shoes already abandoned by the door.

  
“Are you okay?” He asks Vahn softly, and the Hellborn sighs, leaning against the curtains to rest his forehead to the window. He can feel the chill of the glass even through the heavy cotton, and it feels almost soothing to have something cool against his skin after all of the flame running through him.

  
“I don’t know.” He answers honestly, “I don’t know if I’m okay. But I think I’m happy, that’s got to be enough, right?”  
  


He turns from the window as Carver hums, tossing his wet shirt aside over a little hook for cloaks and letting it drip on the carpeted floor below. He starts working on his pants, and Vahn chuckles at him affectionately, moving toward the bed so he can set down his endless satchel and withdraw a spare set of clothes for Carver. He doesn’t doubt that _everythin_ _g_ in his human friend’s bag is soaked through, but his clothes should fit Carver anyway. Vahn likes wearing things a little larger than necessary, and that will certainly come in handy here, when Carver is almost a half-foot taller than he is.   
  


“Being happy isn’t really normal for me.” Carver says idly as he plucks the pants from the edge of the bed, knowing Vahn has his face turned to preserve Carver’s last shreds of dignity, “Is it normal for you?”  
  


“Not really,” Vahn shrugs, “I’m not used to feeling much at all. It’s hard to let yourself feel things when you’re contracted to kill.”  
  


“Hm. Yes, about that,” Carver shucks his shirt over his head finally and pads over to sit at Vahn’s side. He reaches out, tentatively, puts a hand over one of Vahn’s balled fists in the hellborn’s lap, trying to reassure with just the cool touch of his skin, “I’ll see what I can do. I have contacts… I can pay them off. I can fake your death.”

Vahn gives a shuddery little laugh, “Save it for after we get done with this business. You might not have to _fake_ it.”

  
  
“Don’t think like that,” Carver pulls at Vahn’s hand until he relents and allows the human to thread their fingers together, “We’re working together, all of us, so we stand a much better chance at surviving. If we were doing this without you, without me, without Ashen or Rogal or Lila- we’d be far more likely to die. We’re all a good team.”  
  


“Having something to fight for is…” Vahn sighs, shakes his head, “I don’t know. Anyway- let me get changed, it’s about time we get some sleep.”

  
“I know you won’t sleep for hours.” Carver teases warmly as Vahn stands and breaks away from him to rustle in the satchel for his own change of clothes, and Vahn chuckles at him,

  
“No, but there’s no harm in getting nice and cosy in bed. Are you arguing?”  
  


“Maybe a little.” Carver’s smile is warm and creases the corners of his eyes when Vahn looks over, and he will later reason that this is what distracts him from his usual meticulous care of his privacy. He pulls his turtleneck over his head to change his shirt, adding it to the pile of belts and coats that is his outfit on the floor, and hears a sharp little intake of breath from Carver before he realises with startling clarity what he’s just done.

  
“Shit, don’t look,” Vahn scrambles to get his shirt on, gets it tangled in his hair and on his short, stubby horns, panicking his way into getting it stuck more. Carver sighs as he stands and makes his way over, helping to untangle the shirt and pull it down, fitting it over Vahn’s horns and settling it in place to hide the mess of circular, runic scars that litter his body.

Carver sits back down.

Vahn avoids his eyes.

“Is that why you could read the pillars?” Carver asks, and Vahn doesn’t have to ask him to specify what he means. He just nods, silently, going through the motions to change his pants, too. He’s reasonably confident that Carver won’t ask him to leave over this- which this, in itself, shocks him- but he’s still terrified of the questions to come.  
  


“It’s archaic Drakor,” Vahn says, frowning a little, “It’s what all of the old runes are written in. They’re from back before magic was restored properly, back when it was all specific spells and fueled by your blood or your knowledge. Back in the days of wizards.”

  
He moves to the bed, still avoiding Carver’s eyes when he sits,

  
“There were a lot of them in the place I grew up. I couldn’t always read them, but if you stare at something for long enough, it does start to make sense. Once Jester resurrected me, I… needed a way to hide. These,” he gestures with his whole hand to his torso area, “These make it hard for people to see me. To recognise me. It’s part of why you had such a hard time recognising my lies as Corvis. They’re all about glamour and change, slipping through the veil and walking between worlds. So they’re ritual scarification, I guess.”

  
“Do they hurt?” Carver startles himself by how almost childish the question sounds, and Vahn smiles a little, shakes his head,

  
“Not anymore. They took weeks to heal, back when I first did them. And I had to do them in little bits. But now they’re just… there.”

Carver offers a hand out to him, and Vahn takes it, shocked by how much he’s shaking with the fear of rejection, fear of being discovered. The fear of being _him._

“Please don’t tell the others.” Vahn says, quietly, and Carver shakes his head with a breath of laughter,

  
“I won’t. They don’t need to know. But are you okay? You looked so hurt, at the pillar…”

  
“They’re a painful memory of everything I lost.” Vahn’s fingers run across the intricate lines and circles and runes of his scars, tracing the path of magic in the slight raised bump of his skin, feeling it crackle under his fingers like electricity.

  
“I think I get that.” Carver squeezes his hand, and Vahn leans in to set his head on Carver’s shoulder, closing his eyes, warmth trickling through him. He wants to tell Carver he’s grateful, he wants to say some kind of thanks, but he finds himself completely without the energy. Instead, he simply tugs a little at Carver’s hand and murmurs the word,

  
“Bed,”

  
They put the satchel on the floor, light the little oil lamp, and scramble under the covers to snuggle up together. Vahn cuddles into Carver, rests his head on his shoulder, and falls almost instantly to sleep. In the quiet between then and his own repose, Carver gently traces the very edges of the scarred circles under the hem of Vahn’s shirt and finds himself torn between pity and curiosity, for being unseen is certainly a thing that he, himself, would be _very_ interested in.


	24. Found and Lost

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The squad heads toward the peak...

Ophelia can feel the shift in the air when she opens her eyes at first light the following morning. There’s a sort of static buzz, whispers around her and in her ears, the wind seems evermore playful in pulling at her hair and teasing her with its swirls and eddies. She rests, stood atop the ring that will one day again house the Solis Speculum, Veritas held loosely in her left hand. It has long since gone quiet in protest at her ownership, learning quickly that she does not plan to relent it. It has resigned itself to patience, and that is something that Veritas has long learned in its not-quite-life.

Truth and patience. One always leads to the other, and both are unforgiving masters. They will find everyone in time.

There is an electricity across the clear sky under the true blue, an excitement that pulls at each of the little band of friends in turn when they step out of the inn for the first time in the early morning. They pass food vendors on their way toward the mountain path, and they buy varying types of food and snacks and sweets to ease their hike up the side of the sheer cliffs.  
The grass here is scrubbish, with heather and gorse bushes scattered intermittently and trees here growing in gnarled ways, branches skinny and trunks thick and sturdy. The leaves are just beginning to bud, mountain hares scatter across the unbeaten path ahead of the party as they push on, blending in against the grey-brown stone underfoot and becoming stark against the bright green of the spring grass.

They spy many, many animals on their way up, during their long journey. Lila points them out excitedly, mountain goats and sheep, a herd of cattle being corralled by a farmer with a wide-brimmed straw hat, crows and magpies cawing overhead.   
They stop at the side of the river that runs down the mountain to the lake they’d first appeared at- or in, in Carver’s case. They throw a blanket down and sit, wide-eyed and happy and considerably relaxed to eat their lunch, and they’re talking quietly under the gentle wind and bird calls when Lila gasps and hushes them all.

  
“Look,” She whispers, eyes wide and excited as she points to a nearby gorse bush, maybe fifteen feet from where they’re sat, “Over there.”

  
The others follow her gaze and spy a sheep- a ewe, evidently, laid down beside the gorse and bleating softly as it licks at the somewhat gory slime of a newborn lamb, trembling in the newness of the world and making noises that they see rather than hear. Lila is crying when they look back to her, happy sobbing into her scarf to keep herself quiet, and they sit together and watch the ewe and her lamb as she cleans it up. After an hour or so, the ewe gets to her feet, somewhat unsteadily, and her lamb clambers up on spindly legs to join her as she ambles away back downhill, not quite fully recovered, but happy enough.   
When the sheep are out of sight, Lila lets herself cry a little louder, prompting a quick shoulder pat from Rogal,

  
“Li? Are you alright?”

  
“I just- I _love_ baby animals! I love seeing things be born! This is what we’re fighting for… or, what we have to fight for. People, animals, new things- if we don’t protect the world for that little lamb, who will?”

  
“Somebody else,” Carver says, but it’s in such a different tone to his usual, downtrodden one that Vahn watches him with wide eyes. It’s said, this time, with a determination. A firmness, the sort of voice that echoes, resounds with the knowledge that he- they- won’t fail. “Come on,” Carver gestures to the group, “We still have a fair way to go. Let’s get packed up and go and find Ophelia.”

The others nod and murmur agreements, packing up the blanket and the remainders of their food as Carver takes a few steps away from the group to breathe, and Vahn follows him to set a hand on his shoulder.

  
“I’m proud of you,” He tells Carver, who turns and frowns at him in confusion,

  
“Proud? Why?”

  
“You’ve come so far in such a short time. I think we all have,” Vahn looks over his shoulder to where Rogal and Ashen are working together to fold the blanket, Ashen chuckling at some joke or story that Rogal is animatedly telling. It’s happiness, and it’s an unusual expression to wear for the Ô'ayli's-perla.

Carver follows his eye and smiles,

“I suppose you’re right. I still don’t understand what we’re doing, not really, but I know that Li has seen the end of the world and we’ve to stop it. I just- I’m so scared we’ll fail.”

  
“We won’t.” Vahn takes his hand, grip sure and firm, “We can’t fail. We’re all together in this, and as long as we’re all together, we can do anything.”

Carver smiles, turns to him and gently kisses his forehead.

“I hope that you’re right.”

They take back to the path shortly after, everything packed away into Vahn’s endless satchel for safekeeping. The electric feeling in the air only grows stronger as they press onward, and the cheer that they’d had at such a lovely day begins to shift into something more ominous, more fearful. The hair on the back of Rogal’s neck stands up, and he reaches for his scythe,

  
“Rogal?” Carver asks in a whisper that can barely be heard over the wind that seems to have whipped up so suddenly in the high eaves of the mountain. The sound of birds is no more, now. Only wind, the crunch of footsteps on stone, and the staggered breath of five tired young adults.

  
“Something is wrong,” Rogal replies quietly, unclipping his scythe and eyes glowing as he unravels it to its full size, “Something dangerous is here.”  
  


Lila draws her quarterstaff from her bag, and Rogal looks over to her and shakes his head,

  
“I don’t think that will be very useful. Do you have the gloves?”

  
Lila pulls a face. The gloves were a gift from Jason before they left, but despite her prowess in hand-to-hand, Lila hates to use her martial gifts. She’s far more comfortable even with a longbow than with the quarterstaff, and even that far outstrips her comfort for brawling. Still, though, she nods at Rogal and withdraws the links of fine silver chain and rings from her bag, quietly pulling them on her hands, over her leather gloves. One silver ring on each finger and thumb, and a bracelet-like clasp around her forearm that she carefully loads with a golden crystal that Ashen has filled with lightning. In the other, she twists in a little silver crystal for ice that Vahn had given her back during their hike through the forest. Her fists glow in dull gold and silver, and she looks to the others expectantly.

Rogal shoots an apologetic look over his shoulder,

  
“Ashen,” he says quietly, “You’ll need Dolor.”

Ashen, halfway through nocking an arrow, looks up with eyes wide,

  
“ _What?_ ”  
  


“The arrows won’t touch them.”  
  


“Won’t touch _what?_ ” is all Ashen has time to ask before he’s being blasted back by a roiling mass of shadow that pounces at him with unnatural speed, snarling. As though this was the cue, another three seep out from the dark spaces underneath rocks and take places. 

The quick once-over that Lila gets of them before she springs to Ashen’s side, it shakes her to her very core. These things are vaguely humanoid in shape, but seem to be made of pure, tumultuous shadow that licks off of them like a dark flame. In place of their faces, they have two round holes like burning coal that dart and follow each of their little movements, and a mouth of the same substance with razor-sharp, two-inch fangs that splits what should be their whole head.

Also, she notes as she gives the one holding Ashen down a sharp uppercut laced with lightning to throw it a few feet back, they seem to have some kind of sharpened claws at the ends of their gangly arms. Ashen looks up at her with wide eyes, hand over the deep gash across his chest. She ducks and slaps her hand to the wound, throwing her soul into healing, into protecting as her friends rush into action behind her.

Rogal moves before the other boys, swirling his scythe in a wide arc and bringing it down at the shadow-stuff of the nearest monster, carving away only slithers and springing back quickly when it lunges for him. He uses the scythe as a prop, grounding one end of it hard and sliding to a quick stop as he holds it for balance. At one side, suddenly, there's a huge explosion of light and heat that he has to duck away from, and when he looks to its source, he finds Vahn stood in swirling wind with his gun in his hand, already flicking the barrel of the revolver around. Colour shoots up the handle to illuminate the dark lenses of his leather, raven-style mask when he takes a step forward, a deep blue not too far removed from his own. He shoots, the bullet glows as it makes contact with this shadow creature raising its claws for another swipe at Rogal, and then as though it becomes liquid, it spills into a puddle on the floor. Rogal scrambles back for his balance as Carver comes in to his other side, holding another of Vahn’s guns and aiming for the pool of darkness on the floor, rimed in almost-cobalt blue.

  
“What the _fuck_ are these?” He near-screams, and Rogal is too shaken to reply. Instead, he sweeps his scythe down to cut through the puddle of darkness, and is unsurprised to find he only seems to carve part of it away.  
  


“Keep going,” Vahn’s voice comes muffled by the mask, and he fiddles at Rogal’s back for a moment before he draws Dolor from its sheath, “Don’t stop.”

They don’t hesitate to obey, Carver and Rogal unload on the dark shape as it begins to shake the shackles of the gravity magic and reform, blasting into it with magical bullet after bullet, carving off shards of its shadow-stuff with a sharpened blade. It does not seem to weaken.

Vahn drags the greatsword at his side as he rushes to Ashen and Lila, taking a rough shot over Lila’s shoulder at the shadow-thing creeping up on their right side. It drops back a few feet, but continues- no real matter, as the blast of fire from Vahn’s gun catches Lila’s attention and she turns to it once again to punch at it.  
Vahn stabs the greatsword into the earth beside Ashen and offers him the newly free hand, shooting blind over his shoulder as he does and catching a shadow-thing in the blast of a fireball.

  
“You alright?” Vahn asks, and Ashen nods once, quickly, so Vahn pats him on the shoulder and turns away to begin blasting at the other shadows.  
  


Rogal spins his scythe around, as quick as he can, eyes glowing with blood-red as he concentrates his magic on holding this shadow-thing still, only to find it has no blood to manipulate. This slows the drag of his scythe just a shred, just a little too much, and Carver realises too late that the claws are coming down, so he does the best he can.

He steps in front of Rogal.

  
In the split second of impact, the first strike of lightning across a newly-clouded sky, Carver is thrown aside with blood trailing from the new wounds in his abdomen. Vahn’s lightning shot goes wide on one of the two shadows he’s ducking around, Ashen at his left pinning the other with a greatsword he shouldn’t know how to use. Lila’s uppercut blows through the chest of her shadow, decimating and dissipating it, as Carver lands and rolls with a heavy thud.

To say that there was a moment of pause would be to understate the battle. There is no poetic justice in the realities of life, only claws and teeth and blackened eyes as an ancient evil greatsword lends its power to defeat its own kin. Only coal-bright eyes and the leering smile of an almost-murderer as Rogal takes its head off with his scythe and it dissipates on the wind.

Only the blast of a blind gunshot loaded with flame, shot haphazardly behind Vahn as he runs but finding its target true anyway, sending a ripple of fire out to singe all the grass within twenty feet, and Ashen too for good measure.

“Carver!” Vahn skids in the damp mud and beginning drizzle as thunder crackles above them, the lightning striking again at the top of the mountain. At the cry, the others turn and rush for them, for the spreading pool of blood that Vahn kneels in, free hand on Carver’s stomach where his insides are rapidly trying to become outsides, faint blue the best he can do to try and hold Carver’s life in place.

Lila lands at Carver’s other side and ducks, and in the dark spring thunderstorm, a teal light glows as the last beacon of hope for a group of would-be heroes gathered around a friend they beg to all the Gods to stop falling.


End file.
